'I can tell you but little of what passed. His sentences were
incoherent, but half finished, and bursting with passion that was
neither grief nor rage, nor reproach nor pardon, though a mixture of
them all. The chief impression that he left upon my mind was, that he
should soon be freed from the torment of existence: not by the course
of nature; he complained, with agony, that labour, disappointment,
injustice, and contamination itself could not kill him; but die he
would!

'From that day to this, I have never seen or heard word of him more.
The deep despair with which he uttered his last resolution has kept me
in a state of uninterrupted terror. I daily read all the papers I can
buy or borrow with the excruciating dread, every paragraph I come to,
of catching his name, and, Oh! insufferable horror! reading an account
of his death!

'My state of being seems wholly changed! I am no longer the same
creature! My faculties, which formerly compared to those of my brother
I thought slow even to stupidity, are now awakened to such keenness
of discernment that the world is multiplied upon me a million fold!
Sometimes it is all intelligence, though of a dark and terrific hue;
at other moments objects swarm so thick that they dance confusion, and
give me a foretaste of madness, to which I have now a constant fear
that I shall be driven. My own deep shame, the loss of the man whom
like an idiot I dearly loved, my mother's death, my brother's letter,
and particularly his last visit, have altogether given such an
impetuosity to my thoughts as I want the power to repel. Whither they
will hurry me God only knows. At one interval I imagine the earth
contains nothing but evil! At another, strange to tell! all is good!