d sensitiveness to the
beautiful in nature and art, but the exhilaration of the wine-cup
was to him a fatal knowledge. It made him in the end a poor,
despised, inferior man.

As he lost his self-mastery, he also seemed to lose his
self-respect. He mingled with the depraved, and carried the
consciousness of his inferiority into all his associations with
better society.

"I once saw Hoffman," says one, "in one of his night carouses. He
was sitting in his glory at the head of the table, not stupidly
drunk, but warmed with wine, which made him madly eloquent. There,
in full tide of witty discourse, or, if silent, his hawk eye
flashing beneath his matted hair, sat this unfortunate genius until
the day began to dawn; then he found his way homeward.

"At such hours he used to write his wild, fantastic tales. To his
excited fancy everything around him had a spectral look. The shadows
of fevered thought stalked like ghosts through his soul."

This stimulated life came to a speedy conclusion. He was struck with
a most strange paralysis at the age of forty-six.

His disease first paralyzed his hands and feet, then his arms and
legs, then his whole body, except his brain and vital organs.

In this condition it was remarked in his presence that death was not
the worst of evils. He stared wildly and exclaimed,--

"Life, life, only life,--on any condition whatsoever!"

His whole hope was centred in the gay world which had already become
to him as a picture of the past.

But the hour came at last when he knew he must die. He asked his
wife to fold his useless hands on his breast, and, looking at her
pitifully, he said, "And we must think of God also."

Religion, in his gay years, as a provincial musician, and as a poet
in the thoughtless society of the capital, had seldom occupied his
thoughts.

His last thought was given to the subject which should have claimed
the earliest and best efforts of his life.

"God also!" It was his farewell to the world. The demons had done
their work. Life's opportunities were ended.

The words of his afterthought echo after him, and, like his own
weird stories, have their lesson.

Herman Reed presented a story from a more careful writer. It is a
story with an aim, and left an impressive lesson on the minds of all.
If it be somewhat of an allegory, it is one whose meaning it is not
hard to comprehend.

THE HE