raised almost to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven
beyond his reach. Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to
seek for peace from the trigger of a pistol.

How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the midst of millions of
fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large.
Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a
young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending
ideas have striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside;
what moans and what despair have been repressed; what abortive
masterpieces and vain endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of
sorrow. Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas
of literature that can compare with this paragraph:

"Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the
Seine from the Pont des Arts."

Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
even that old frontispiece, _The Lamentations of the glorious king of
Kaernavan, put in prison by his children_, the sole remaining fragment
of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the
same Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.

The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and
of memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among
the green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against