I never see a vast crowd of faces—at theatres, races, reviews—but one thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to die. Strange it is that this multitude of people, so many of them intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without forethought or sense of the realities of life.
Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well with other things.
This is curious:
Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure,
When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
This offends nobody, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:
When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,
Self-murder is an honourable way—
though the same essentially, this shocks all men.
I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which in my youth I fled.
The Arrow Ketch, six guns, is recorded in the Edinburgh Advertiser for June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'
Anecdotes from Edinburgh Advertiser, for June and May. The dog of a boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow passed away, leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a stepmother's wrath.