er brother she writes: "Good-by forever, my own dearest brother.
By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love,
there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I am tired of
living, so am willing to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but death
to me is sweeter." S. A. K. Strahan: Suicide and Insanity, 2d
edition, London, 1894, p. 131.

So much for melancholy in the sense of incapacity for joyous feeling.
A much worse form of it is positive and active anguish, a sort of
psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life. Such anguish may
partake of various characters, having sometimes more the quality of
loathing; sometimes that of irritation and exasperation; or again of
self-mistrust and self-despair; or of suspicion, anxiety, trepidation,
fear. The patient may rebel or submit; may accuse himself, or accuse
outside powers; and he may or he may not be tormented by the
theoretical mystery of why he should so have to suffer. Most cases are
mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications with too much
respect. Moreover, it is only a relatively small proportion of cases
that connect themselves with the religious sphere of experience at all.
Exasperated cases, for instance, as a rule do not. I quote now
literally from the first case of melancholy on which I lay my hand. It
is a letter from a patient in a French asylum.

"I suffer too much in this hospital, both physically and morally.
Besides the burnings and the sleeplessness (for I no longer sleep since
I am shut up here, and the little rest I get is broken by bad dreams,
and I am waked with a jump by night mares dreadful visions, lightning,
thunder, and the rest), fear, atrocious fear, presses me down, holds me
without respite, never lets me go. Where is the justice in it all!
What have I done to deserve this excess of severity? Under what form
will this fear crush me? What would I not owe to any one who would rid
me of my life! Eat, drink, lie awake all night, suffer without
interruption--such is the fine legacy I have received from my mother!
What I fail to understand is this abuse of power. There are limits to
everything, there is a middle way. But God knows neither middle way
nor limits. I say God, but why? All I have known so far has been the
devil. After all, I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I
drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage
nor means here to execute the