d me nearly annihilated by their
powers. Never for one moment when most placid did I cease to pray for
death. I could be found in no state of mind which I would not
willingly have exchanged for nothingness. And morning and evening my
tearful eyes raised to heaven, my hands clasped tight in the energy of
prayer, I have repeated with the poet--

Before I see another day
Oh, let this body die away!

Let me not be reproached then with inutility; I believed that by
suicide I should violate a divine law of nature, and I thought that I
sufficiently fulfilled my part in submitting to the hard task of
enduring the crawling hours & minutes[50]--in bearing the load of time
that weighed miserably upon me and that in abstaining from what I in
my calm moments considered a crime, I deserved the reward of virtue.
There were periods, dreadful ones, during which I despaired--& doubted
the existence of all duty & the reality of crime--but I shudder, and
turn from the rememberance.

[E] Coleridge's Fire, Famine and Slaughter.

CHAPTER IX

Thus I passed two years. Day after day so many hundreds wore on; they
brought no outward changes with them, but some few slowly operated on
my mind as I glided on towards death. I began to study more; to
sympathize more in the thoughts of others as expressed in books; to
read history, and to lose my individuallity among the crowd that had
existed before me. Thus perhaps as the sensation of immediate
suffering wore off, I became more human. Solitude also lost to me some
of its charms: I began again to wish for sympathy; not that I was ever
tempted to seek the crowd, but I wished for one friend to love me. You
will say perhaps that I gradually became fitted to return to society.
I do not think so. For the sympathy that I desired must be so pure, so
divested of influence from outward circumstances that in the world I
could not fail of being balked by the gross materials that perpetually
mingle even with its best feelings. Believe me, I was then less fitted
for any communion with my fellow creatures than before. When I left
them they had tormented me but it was in the same way as pain and
sickness may torment; somthing extraneous to the mind that galled it,
and that I wished to cast aside. But now I should have desired
sympathy; I should wish to knit my soul to some one of theirs, and
should have prepared for myself plentiful draughts of disappointment
and suffering; for I was tender