Thus died Madame Roland, in the thirty-ninth year of her age. Her death oppressed all who had known her with the deepest grief. Her intimate friend Buzot, who was then a fugitive, on hearing the tidings, was thrown into a state of perfect delirium, from which he did not recover for many days. Her faithful female servant was so overwhelmed with grief, that she presented herself before the tribunal, and implored them to let her die upon the same scaffold where her beloved mistress had perished. The tribunal, amazed at such transports of attachment, declared that she was mad, and ordered her to be removed from their presence. A man-servant made the same application, and was sent to the guillotine. The grief of M. Roland, when apprized of the event, was unbounded. For a time he entirely lost his senses. Life to him was no longer endurable. He knew not of any consolations of religion. Philosophy could only nerve him to stoicism. Privately he left, by night, the kind friends who had hospitably concealed him for six months, and wandered to such a distance from his asylum as to secure his protectors from any danger on his account. Through the long hours of the winter's night he continued his dreary walk, till the first gray of the morning appeared in the east. Drawing a long stilletto from the inside of his walking-stick, he placed the head of it against the trunk of a tree, and threw himself upon the sharp weapon. The point pierced his heart, and he fell lifeless upon the frozen ground. Some peasants passing by discovered his body. A piece of paper was pinned to the breast of his coat, upon which there were written these words: "Whoever thou art that findest these remains, respect them as those of a virtuous man. After hearing of my wife's death, I would not stay another day in a world so stained with crime." FOOTNOTE: [17] From ABBOTT'S "History of Madame Roland," soon to be issued from the press of Harper & Brothers. [From Dickens's Household Words.] CHEMICAL CONTRADICTIONS. Science, whose aim and end is to prove the harmony and "eternal fitness of things," also proves that we live in a world of paradoxes; and that existence itself is a whirl of contradictions. Light and darkness, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, the negative and positive poles of galvanic or magnetic mysteries, are evidences of all-pervading antitheses, which, acting like the good and evil genii of Persian Mythology, neutralize each other's powers when they come into collision. It is the office of science to solve these mysteries. The appropriate symbol of the lecture-room is a Sphinx; for a scientific lecturer is but a better sort of unraveler of riddles.