sepulchral urn, seemed to come imbued with all gloomy inspirations;
so that its influence was not to cheer, but either to sink the
revellers into a deeper melancholy, or elevate their spirits to an
enthusiasm of wretchedness. The conversation was various. They
told sad stories about people who might have been Worthy guests at
such a festival as the present. They talked of grisly incidents in
human history; of strange crimes, which, if truly considered, were
but convulsions of agony; of some lives that had been altogether
wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general semblance of
happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by misfortune, as
by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of death-bed scenes,
and what dark intimations might be gathered from the words of dying
men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were by halter,
knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of
charcoal. The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people
thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their
own woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most
excellent in anguish. The misanthropist went deep into the
philosophy of evil, and wandered about in the darkness, with now and
then a gleam of discolored light hovering on ghastly shapes and
horrid scenery. Many a miserable thought, such as men have stumbled
upon from age to age, did he now rake up again, and gloat over it as
an inestimable gem, a diamond, a treasure far preferable to those
bright, spiritual revelations of a better world, which are like
precious stones from heaven's pavement. And then, amid his lore of
wretchedness he hid his face and wept.

It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have
been a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have
tasted deepest of the bitterness of life. And be it said, too, that