I
have not a single friend to whom I can wholly confide myself.... How
often must I curse my ever wishing to be for once as happy as other men!
How often have I wished myself back again in my old, isolated
condition,--to be nothing, to wish nothing, to do nothing, but what the
present moment brings with it!... Yet I am too proud to think myself
unhappy. I just grind my teeth, and let the boat go as pleases wind and
waves. Enough that I will not overset it myself." It is plain from this
letter that suicide had been in his mind, and, with his antique way of
thinking on many subjects, he would hardly have looked on it as a crime.
But he was too brave a man to throw up the sponge to fate, and had work
to do yet. Within a few days of his wife's death he wrote to Eschenburg:
"I am right heartily ashamed if my letter betrayed the least despair.
Despair is not nearly so much my failing as levity, which often expresses
itself with a little bitterness and misanthropy." A stoic, not from
insensibility or cowardice, as so many are, but from stoutness of heart,
he blushes at a moment's abdication of self-command. And he will not roil
the clear memory of his love with any tinge of the sentimentality so much
the fashion, and to be had so cheap, in that generation.
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