eatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large. Between
a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a young man
to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending ideas have
striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside; what moans and
what despair have been repressed; what abortive masterpieces and vain
endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of sorrow. Where will you find
a work of genius floating above the seas of literature that can compare
with this paragraph:

"Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the
Seine from the Pont des Arts."

Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
even that old frontispiece, _The Lamentations of the glorious king of
Kaernavan, put in prison by his children_, the sole remaining fragment
of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the same
Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.

The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and of
memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among the
green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all decreed
that he should die.

He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly at
the water.

"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman, who
grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"

His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
door of the Tuilerie