orator; and I should not have alluded to him here but for the fact
that in early youth, and amid greater expectations of him, he
passed away from this life of high aims and poor fulfilments. I
think how poor Keats, no doubt morbidly ambitious as well as morbidly
sensitive, declared in his preface to Endymion that 'there is no
fiercer hell than failure in a great attempt.'

Most thoughtful men must feel it a curious and interesting study,
to trace the history of the closing days of those persons who have
calmly and deliberately, in no sudden heat of passion, taken away
their own life. In such cases, of course, we see the sense of
failure, absolute and complete. They have quietly resolved lo give
up life as a losing game. You remember the poor man who, having
spent his last shilling, retired to a wood far from human dwellings,
and there died voluntarily by starvation. He kept a diary of those
days of gradual death, setting out his feelings both of body and
mind. No nourishment passed his lips after he had chosen his last
resting-place, save a little water, which he dragged himself to
a pond to drink. He was not discovered till he was dead; but his
melancholy chronicle appeared to have been carried down to very
near the time when he became unconscious. I remember its great
characteristic appeared to be a sense of utter failure. There
seemed to be no passion, none of the bitter desperate resolution
which prompts the energetic 'Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world;'
but merely a weary, lonely wish to creep quietly away. I have no
look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide's grave.
I think the common English verdict is right as well as charitable,
which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged,
and responsibility is gone. And what desperate misery, what a
black horrible anguish of heart, whether expressing itself calmly