ese tyrants are
faithfully preserved? Was the world, with all its climates, made in vain
for thy helpless, unoffending victim?

To me the sun brings no return of day. Day after day rolls on, and my state
is immutable. Existence is to me a scene of melancholy. Every moment is a
moment of anguish, with a trembling fear that the coming period will bring
a severer fate. We talk of the instruments of torture, but there is more
torture in the lingering existence of a man that is in the iron clutches of
a monster that has neither eyes, nor ears, nor bowels of compassion; a
venomous enemy that can never be turned into a friend; a silent, sleepless
foe, that shuts out from the light of day, and makes its victim the
associate of those whom society has marked for her abhorrence; a slave
loaded with fetters that no power can break; cut off from all that
existence has to bestow; from all the high hopes so often conceived; from
all the future excellence the soul so much desires to imagine. No language
can do justice to the indignant and soul-sickening loathing that these
ideas excite. A thousand times I have longed for death, and wished, with an
expressible ardor, for an end to what I suffered. A thousand times I have
meditated suicide, and ruminated in my soul upon the different means of
escaping from my load of existence. A thousand times in wretched bitterness
I have asked myself, What have I to do with life? I have seen and felt
enough to make me regard it with detestation. Why should I wait the
lingering process of an unfeeling tyrant that is slowly tearing me to
pieces, and not dare so much as die but when and how the marble-hearted
thing decrees? Still, some inexplicable suggestion withheld my hand, and
caused me to cling with desperate fondness to this shadow of existence, its
mysterious attractions, and its hopeless prospects--appetite, fiendish
thirst, a burning, ever-crying demand for a poison that is death, and for
which a man will give his body and soul as a sacrifice to whoever will
satisfy his imperious cravings. Let this appetite entwine itself about a
man, let it throw its iron arms about his bruised body, and he will curse
the day he was born. But some one says, Why don't you quit? Just don't
drink! In answer I would say, O God, give me poverty, shower upon me all
the hardships of life, turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so
I be never again the victim of rum. Suffer me to call life and the pursuit
of li