658 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I have no ideas — I feel neither pain nor pleasure ; all acts, all sensa- 

 tions, are alike to me ; I am an automaton, incapable of thinking, or 

 feeling, or recollecting — of will and of motion." This form of melan- 

 cholia is a disease, and not a passion. It is a species of dementia akin 

 to those strange aberrations which go by the name of lycanthropy, 

 lypemania, etc. 



The true passional melancholy is that reflex, profound, painful 

 feeling of the imperfections of our nature, and of the nothingness of 

 human life, which seizes on certain minds, torturing them, dishearten- 

 ing them, and making their life one long sigh. This feeling is ex- 

 pressed by the gentle poet Virgil, when he says, " Sunt lacrimae re- 

 rum " (everywhere tears). This is the gloomy thought that haunts the 

 mind of Hamlet, the hallucinatory despair of Pascal, the sadness 

 which broods over Oberman and Rene, the bitter, heart-rending cry 

 of Childe Harold, the grand desolation of Manfred, the inquietude 

 and the agony represented by Albert Dtirer's graver and by Feti's 

 pencil. Melancholy so defined has a place in the depths of the heart 

 of every man that philosophically contemplates Destiny, nor need we 

 seek elsewhere an explanation of the sombre humor which distin- 

 guishes men of this kind, and which is witnessed to by those books 

 wherein they convey to us the history of their souls' troubles. If such 

 a humor as this had its source in the common ills of life — in its suffer- 

 ings, its miseries, and its deceptions — we might understand it perhaps 

 in the case of such men as Swift, Rousseau, Shelley, and Leopardi ; 

 but, when we meet with it in such favored geniuses as Byron, Goethe, 

 Lamartine, and Alfred de Vigny, we are forced to acknowledge that, 

 in men of the higher stamp, its cause must be the pain they feel on 

 seeing that they cannot slake their ideal thirst. 1 • Such is the melan- 

 choly which we may call the philosophic. 



Besides this, there is another form of melancholy which proceeds 

 from better-defined causes, i. e., from the common griefs and vexa- 

 tions of life. Reverses of fortune, balked ambitions, and disappoint- 

 ments in love, are usually the causes of this kind of sadness, which, 

 being far more active than purely philosophic sadness, often gives 

 rise to organic disorders of the most serious kind. Albert Diirer suc- 

 cumbed to the vexations caused him by his wife. Kepler died the 

 victim of the afflictions heaped upon him by Fate. Disappointment 

 in love is one of the most frequent causes of melancholy. This it is 

 which harassed and tortured Mdlle. de Lespinasse — which troubled 

 and worried the chaste soul of Pamela : it was the death of the beau- 

 tiful Genoese, Tommasina Spinola, when she heard of Louis XII.'s ill- 

 ness, and of Lady Caroline Lamb, when she went home after the fu- 



1 " What from this barren being do we reap ? 

 Our senses narrow and our reason frail, 

 Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep." 



— " Childe Harold," iv., 93. 



