but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master,
Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He
threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of
one making a leap.

Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will
meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream
of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from
that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ...
whining sorrow ... but grim defiance.

Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:--

I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce,
upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time
eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago....

Oh! little did my mother think,
That day she cradled me,
The lands that I should travel in,
The death I was to dee.

My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in
a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain.
How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself,
sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And
hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to
use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while
my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not
breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health,