“Some leaped overboard with dreadful yell, As eager to anticipate the grave.”
Shakspeare’s Constance, in her grief, draws well the character of death, as—
“Misery’s love, The hate and terror of prosperity.”
A woman who has lost her honor; a soldier convicted of poltroonery; a patriot who sees his country enslaved; a miser robbed; a speculator bankrupt; a poet unappreciated, or harshly criticized, as in poor Keats’s case—
“Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article”—
all these seem to loathe life, or, at any rate, lose much of their fondness for it. It is curious to remark, too, how little, as in the last-mentioned instance, will suffice to extinguish, abruptly or gradually, this usually tenacious instinct. A man in York cut his throat, because, as he left in writing, “he was tired of buttoning and unbuttoning.” The occurrence of a loathsome but very curable disease in a patient of mine, just when he was about to be married, induced him to plunge among the breakers off Sullivan’s Island, on one of the coldest days of our coldest winter. A Pole in New York wrote some verses just before the act of self-destruction, implying that he was so weary of uncertainty as to the truth of the various theories of the present and future life, that he “had set out on a journey to the other world to find out what he ought to believe in this.”
We are always interested in observing the conduct of brave men, who exhibit a strongly-marked love of life, with little or no fear of death. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Herault Sechelles, who commenced their revolutionary career as reckless as they seemed ferocious, having attained elevation, acquired wealth, and married beautiful women, became merciful and prudent. Hunted in their turn by the bloodhounds of the time, they made the most earnest endeavors to escape, but displayed a noble courage in meeting their fate when inevitable.
It is a trite but true remark, that men will boldly face one mode of death, and shrink timidly from another. A soldier, whom discipline will lead without flinching “up to the imminent deadly breach,” will cower before a sea-storm. Women, even in the act of suicide, dreading explosion and blood, prefer poison and drowning. Men very often choose firearms and cutting instruments, which habit has made familiar.