THE PATHOLOGY OF THE PASSIONS. 657 



than that the accident by which he had been buried alive had occurred 

 upward of fifty years before. The people had ceased to make inquiries 

 as to the identity of the body, when a decrepit old woman came up 

 supported on crutches. She approached the mummified corpse, and 

 in it recognized the body of the man to whom she had been betrothed 

 more than fifty years previously. She threw herself upon the rigid 

 corpse — which was like a bronze statue — wept over it, and manifested 

 intense joy at seeing again the object of her early affection. 



As for the imagination, it transcends all bounds, and loses all char- 

 acter of exactitude. The will is no longer mistress of the vital acts. 

 Says Romeo at the tomb of Juliet : 



" Here, here will I remain 

 With worms that are thy chambermaids. 



Oh, my love! my wife! 

 Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, 

 Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty ; 



.... beauty's ensign yet 

 Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, 

 And Death's pale flag is not advanced there." 



" I am drawn toward you," writes Mdlle. de Lespinasse to M. de 

 Guibert, " by an attraction — by a feeling which I abhor, but which 

 has all the power of malediction and fatality." The, English poet 

 Keats, when dying of consumption, writes thus to a friend : " I am in 

 that state wherein a woman — as woman — has no more power over me 

 than a stock or a stone, and yet the thought of leaving N. is something 

 horrible to me. I am ever seeing her form, which is ever disappear- 

 ing." This latter fact pertains to the history of hallucinations, and 

 this in turn borders on the history of ecstasies, which are so frequent 

 in religious life ; so true is it that love, even mystical and divine, if 

 not confined w r ithin the bounds of reason, turns to a kind of mania, 

 which, as we shall see, is full of danger for the general functions of 

 the mind. 



Thought draws the sketch of life, but passion adds the coloring of 

 the picture. When this passion is a happy one, the coloring is brill- 

 iant and cheerful, and then life is a bright vernal season. But oftener 

 the passion is a painful one, and the color given by it to life is dark- 

 some. Melancholy is one of those passions which throw a gloom over 

 a man's life. There is one form of melancholy which is plainly a va- 

 riety of dementia, and which often comes under the notice of the phy- 

 sician. It is characterized by an incurable sadness, an irresistible 

 love of solitude, absolute inaction, and a belief in a host of imaginary 

 evils that are ever haunting the patient. " My body is a burning 

 fire," wrote a melancholic subject to his medical man ; " my nerves 

 are glowing coals, my blood is boiling oil. Sleep is impossible. I 

 endure martyrdom." — " I am bereft of mind and sensibility," writes 



another ; " my senses are gone — I can neither see nor hear any thing ; 

 vol. iv. — 42 



