Si sedeam cruce, sustine.”
Among hypochondriacs, we often meet with the seemingly paradoxical combination of an intense dread of death unassociated with any perceptible attachment to life; a morbid and most pitiable condition, which urges some to repeated, but ineffectual attempts at suicide. I know not a state of mind more utterly wretched.
Both these sentiments, whether instinctive or educational, are, we should observe, very strikingly influenced by circumstances. Occasionally, they seem to be obliterated, or nearly so; not only in individuals, but in large masses, nay, in whole communities; as during great social convulsions; through the reign of a devastating pestilence; under the shock of repeated disorders of the elements; as in earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storms, and inundations; in protracted sieges, and in shipwrecks. The Reign of Terror produced this state of feeling in France, and thousands went to the scaffold indifferently, or with a jest. Boccacio and others have pictured the same state of undejected despair, if such a phrase be permitted, in which men succumb to fate, and say, with a sort of cheerful hardihood, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” losing thus all dread even of the plague. Pliny the younger, in his flight from Mycena, under the fatal shower of ashes from Vesuvius, heard, amidst the darkness, the prayers of wretches “who desired to die, that they might be released from the expectation of death.” And Byron, in his magnificent description of the shipwreck, in Don Juan, tells us—
“Some leaped overboard with dreadful yell,
As eager to anticipate the grave.”
Shakspeare’s Constance, in her grief, draws well the character of death, as—
“Misery’s love,
The hate and terror of prosperity.”
A woman who has lost her honor; a soldier convicted of poltroonery; a patriot who sees his country enslaved; a miser robbed; a speculator bankrupt; a poet unappreciated, or harshly criticized, as in poor Keats’s case—
“Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle,