THE MELANCHOLY MAN.

BY THEODORE S. FAY.

Mav.-I feel 'tis so.

Thus have I been since first the plague broke out,
A term, methinks, of many hundred years!
As if the world were hell, and I condemned
To walk through wo to all eternity.
I will do suicide.

Astrologer-Thou canst not, fool!

Thou lovest life with all its agonies;

Buy poison, and 't will lie for years untouched
Beneath thy pillow, when thy midnight horrors
Are at their worst. Coward! thou canst not die.

Wilson's City of the Plague.

I HAVE been all my life haunted with a desire to commit suicide. It has crossed me -it still crosses me continually. It is partly the result of constitution, and partly of early and frequent misfortunes, and a habit of brooding over them. This dreadful disease has for ever caused me to look with sickly eyes on the charms of life and the beauties of nature. I shall not here write any history of myself. It

would not interest others. Those incidents which have made me wretched, happier dispositions would soon forget. I can never forget them. I feel that my game of life has been played and lost. Those secret springs of joy and hope, which give elasticity to other minds, in me are broken. I have been always struggling against the current; and sometimes, nay often, it has appeared to me as if some awful and inexorable power were present at my undertakings, and took a mysterious delight in bringing them to ruin. True, my reason often teaches me that this is merely an absurd fancy, and that it cannot be. Yet I think it is, and that is sufficient to make me wretched. Sometimes, in the endeavor to combat this opinion as a superstition, I have compelled myself to embark in a design, or to entertain an affection; but invariably I have met with such severe disappointments, that I have long since ceased to hope. When I first reached the years of manhood, I found this in all my pecuniary business. Stock fell if I touched it; banks broke as soon as I became interested. The fable relates, that whatever the celebrated king of Phrygia touched, turned to gold. Wherever I laid my hand, I was sure to produce destruction. At length I have grown so timid, that I am afraid to love, afraid to form a friendship, afraid to offer advice. He who peruses this, will doubtless smile incredulously on me; he will say it is an impossibility. Well, let him. Indeed it seems equally so to me. I have

racked my brain to believe it merely an accidental train of unfavorable events, which to-morrow may change; yet it has not changed, and I am half fain to abandon myself to the startling and terrible thought, that I am branded with some mysterious curse. Whatever may be the cause, I am miserable, and always have been so beyond description. I look for nothing this side the grave.

I became acquainted, sometime ago, with a little girl, eight or nine years old, with unusual powers of mind and charms of person. The sight of her face positively dispelled the shadows which brooded over my mind. She discovered a singular attachment to me. I was delighted with her thousand winning ways. I was almost happy while under the influence of her irrepressible happiness. It was a joy for me to meet her in the street. I have caught a gleam of her beautiful bright countenance, amid a group of her companions going to school early in the morning, which haunted me all day.

"Shall I love this creature?" said I to myself; "will it not be bringing down upon her sweet young head the dark influence which has ever pursued me and mine? Yes," said I, "I will love her. I will once more try this fearful experiment. I will watch to see in what form the effects of my interest in her welfare will fall on her; to what doom it will consign her? Will the turf soon press her tender breast? Will some mournful doom darken her living heart?"

I made these reflections one morning as she passed me, with a smile, in the street.

One week after, a single line in the newspaper answered my interrogatories. She had died of a sudden and painful attack of the scarlet fever. As I perused the information, I positively thought I heard the laugh of a demon in my ear, whispered on the passing breeze.

It is not one, two, nor indeed twenty circumstances of this kind which could have alone prostrated my love of life so utterly. I never had a real friend, except my mother, and she died just when I was old enough to mourn for her acutely. Among my other tortures, disease has not been wanting. A violent pain in my chest has, at certain intervals, incapacitated me for all employment. Sometimes my head grows dizzy, or burns with shooting pains. I feel like Caliban, forever contending against a supernatural enemy, whose spirits appear busy about me. That speech of the deformed monster ever haunts my memory:

"For every trifle they are set upon me:

Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,
And after, bite me; then, like hedgehogs, which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall. Sometimes I am
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues,
Do hiss me into madness."

The idea of being perpetually encumbered with a disease, which, while it takes from your heart the secret hope that leads to action, does not exclude you from the necessities of toil, is one of the most benumbing and wretched evils that man can suffer. He wanders through the crowd, without participating in their gladness. He gazes on nature with an admiration which only heightens his inward anguish. In the most soft and alluring periods of pleasure, the loathsome image of a grave continually obtrudes itself upon his imagination; the icy hand of death is ever on his shoulder, and he hears the phantom whispering, "Victim of my unrelenting power, haste ye through these sunny scenes; in a short time you must quit them forever." I have felt all this; who can wonder that I am tired of life? I have loved in this world but few, and none successfully. No man, nor woman, nor child has ever been to me other than as gleamings of what my fellow creatures have enjoyed. I recoil from one who excites in me any feelings of affection. No one shall suffer the fatality of my friendship. Who is shocked to learn that I covet my last sleep? Death, mysterious power! language cannot express the intense curiosity with which I have watched every thing appertaining to it. Yes, I have pursued the ghastly phantom in all its forms. I have gone to the prison house, and pryed into the mind of the felon who was at the break of day to expiate his crimes on the scaffold. I have planted myself there