does the soul, over-taxed by the continence of living, yield voluntary
to the grave, and adulterously make of Death its paramour.

'When she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers, she, with a sigh, will tell
Her servants, what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in; and make her maids
Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse.'

[Footnote: Beaumont and Fletcher: _The Maid's Tragedy_.]

The _mode_ spreads--then rushes into rage: to breathe is to be
obsolete: to wear the shroud becomes _comme il faut_, this cerecloth
acquiring all the attractiveness and _éclat_ of a wedding-garment. The
coffin is not too strait for lawless nuptial bed; and the sweet clods
of the valley will prove no barren bridegroom of a writhing progeny.
There is, however, nothing specially mysterious in the operation of a
pestilence of this nature: it is as conceivable, if not yet as
explicable, as the contagion of cholera, mind being at least as
sensitive to the touch of mind as body to that of body.

It was during the ever-memorable outbreak of this obscure malady in the
year 1875 that I ventured to break in on the calm of that deep Silence
in which, as in a mantle, my friend Prince Zaleski had wrapped himself.
I wrote, in fact, to ask him what he thought of the epidemic. His
answer was in the laconic words addressed to the Master in the house of
woe at Bethany:

'Come and see.'