evil, mark the victims as objects for the portrayments of poets.

Two or three days passed off in this way, without the slightest
amelioration of his condition. The efforts of Miss B---- had been repeated
often without effect. As she expressed herself to me, he would neither eat
nor speak, sleep nor weep. "He has not," she added, "even muttered her
name. His heart seems utterly broken; and time and the power of Heaven
alone will effect a change." Such is the common philosophy of sorrow: time
is held forth as all-powerful, all-saving; and while I admit its force, I
only insist for the certainty of the existence of exceptions. The eighth
day had passed without any support having been taken to sustain the system.
A course of maceration, that had been going on during his wife's illness,
was thus continued; yet, in the few words I occasionally drew from him,
there was no indication of anything like the sullen determination of the
suicide; the cause lay in the total cessation of the powers of the
stomach--a consequence of the cerebral pressure, whose action is felt not
where it operates primarily, but in the heart and other organs, where it
works merely by sympathy.

It was on the evening of the eighth day after the funeral, as I have it
noted, that I called to see if any change for the better had been effected
by the ministrations of his sister. She sat by his bedside, with the Bible
placed before her, from which she had been reading passages to him. His
face was turned to the front of the bed, but he did not seem to be in any
way moved by my entrance. All the efforts his sister had made to get him to
enter into the spirit of the passages she had been reading had been
fruitless; nor had he as yet made the slightest allusion to the cause of
his illness, or mentioned the name of his deceased partner. A few words of
no importance, and not related to the circumstances of his grief, were
wrung from him painfully by my questions; but it seemed as if the language
that represents the things of the world had lost all power of charming the
ear; the deadness that had overtaken the heart like a palsy, was felt from
the fountain of feelings, to the minute endings of the nerves; and the
external senses, which are the ministers of the soul, had renounced their
ordinary ministrations to the spirit that heeded them not. Only once his
sister had observed a slight moisture rise for a moment in his eye, as she
touched some tender traits of the