Day after day rolls on, and my state
is immutable. Existence is to me a scene of melancholy. Every moment is a
moment of anguish, with a trembling fear that the coming period will bring
a severer fate. We talk of the instruments of torture, but there is more
torture in the lingering existence of a man that is in the iron clutches of
a monster that has neither eyes, nor ears, nor bowels of compassion; a
venomous enemy that can never be turned into a friend; a silent, sleepless
foe, that shuts out from the light of day, and makes its victim the
associate of those whom society has marked for her abhorrence; a slave
loaded with fetters that no power can break; cut off from all that
existence has to bestow; from all the high hopes so often conceived; from
all the future excellence the soul so much desires to imagine. No language
can do justice to the indignant and soul-sickening loathing that these
ideas excite. A thousand times I have longed for death, and wished, with an
expressible ardor, for an end to what I suffered. A thousand times I have
meditated suicide, and ruminated in my soul upon the different means of
escaping from my load of existence.
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