3 68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the air are hot ; let us float on the cool, calm sea; there is room 

 with careful stowage for us all in my barge/ She accepted the 

 invitation, and, with the children, got into the boat. They soon 

 drifted from the shore, and the poet, unconscious of her fears or 

 of their danger, fell into a deep reverie, probably, as Trelawney 

 suggests, reviewing all that he had gone through of suffering and 

 wrong, with no present and no future. Jane spoke to him several 

 times, but her remarks met with no response. " She saw death in 

 his eyes." Suddenly he raised his head, his brow cleared, and his 

 face brightened as with a bright thought, and he exclaimed joy- 

 fully, " Now let us together solve the great mystery." "With a 

 woman's instinct Jane knew that her only chance was to distract 

 his thoughts, and, suppressing her terror and assuming her usual 

 cheerful voice, she answered promptly : " No, thank you, not now. 

 I should like my dinner first, and so would the children." This 

 gross material answer to his sublime proposition so shocked the 

 poet that he was brought back to himself, and paddled his cockle- 

 shell boat into shallow water. 



A deep melancholy pervades all of the poet's letters from Pisa 

 and Leghorn, and it was at this time that he was engaged upon 

 The Triumph of Life, which was left unfinished by his untimely 

 end. The poem closes abruptly with these words : " Then what 

 is life ? I cried." A sentence of profound significance, as Mr. 

 Symonds says, when we remember that the questioner was now 

 about to seek its answer in the halls of death. "With all this evi- 

 dence before us that death was not unwelcome when it came on 

 that fatal Monday in the winds and waves, is it not fair to assume 

 that had it not come as it did a record of suicide would have 

 been added to one of the most interesting as well as one of the 

 most melancholy histories in the annals of English song ? 



The examples mentioned have been taken at random, and I 

 am well aware that an exhaustive search would have made this 

 paper many times as long. My only aim has been to cite a few 

 prominent examples in illustration of a subject which to my mind 

 is one of fascinating interest, and to draw, if possible, some de- 

 ductions from them. 



Evidence is not lacking to warrant the assumption that genius 

 is a special morbid condition, and the anthropological school of 

 which Lombroso is the brilliant master is daily gaining converts. 

 Although the doctrines which he advocates have recently re- 

 ceived a remarkable impetus, they are not essentially new. Cen- 

 turies ago Seneca taught that there was no great genius without 

 a tincture of madness, and Cicero spoke of the furor poeticus. 

 It is also more than a hundred years since Diderot exclaimed : 

 " Oh, how close the insane and men of genius touch ! They are 

 chained, or statues are raised to them." Lamartine speaks of the 



