er nature which is able to
account for this phenomenon?--A gentle, timid girl of sixteen, whom the
sight of a spider or a live snake would have frightened into hysterics,
I had once an opportunity, on a tour through Italy, to observe, while
she took little or no notice of other works of art, would gaze, as if
fascinated, at the writhings of Laocooen and his sons in the folds and
fangs of the serpents, at the sculptured death of the Gladiator, and
even at the ghastly, repulsive pictures of martyrdoms and barbaric
mutilations and tortures,--the hideous monstrosities of a diseased and
degraded imagination found in the churches and convents of Rome, which
made others turn their backs with a shivering of the bones and a
creeping of the flesh. On expressing surprise at such a singular
exhibition of taste, I received this innocent, unpremeditated
reply:--"Why, I don't like them; the sight of them almost freezes my
blood; but--somehow I do like to look at them, _for I always feel better
after it_!" Now is there not involved in this artless answer a possible
explanation of the above-mentioned fact? Has not woman, hidden somewhere
among her other (of course angelic)--affections, a positive _love_ of
sickness, death, sorrow, and suffering, which man does not possess? Is
not the pain they cause, in her case, qualified by actual pleasure?
Do they not act as a stimulus upon her sensitive nervous system, and
produce, somehow, a _delightfully intoxicated state of the feelings_?
Would not this explain her otherwise unaccountable fondness for
witnessing the execution of murderers, for the horrible in novels
and the deaths and catastrophes in the newspapers, that she has a
constitutional relish for such horrid things, and that she enjoys them,
not because they are _in se_ productive of pleasure, but just, as is the
case with her "crying," _because she feels better after it_? And I think
it would be found, if an investigation of the subject were instituted,
that a foreknowledge of this inevitable result, derived from intuition
or experience, is the agent which breaks up the clouds of her sorrow:
so that, while the grief of a man stricken down by misfortune is an
equinoctial storm, dark and dismal, which lasts for weeks and months,
the grief of woman is a succession of refreshing April showers, each of
brief duration, and the spaces between them filled with sunshine and
rainbows.

But the sweets of that widow's present sorrow will be soon e