pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from _you_ or _them_. The time will come, when, from the want of occupation, the listless and horrible vacancy of your hours, you will feel as anxious to hear those shrieks, as you were at first terrified to hear them,--when you will watch for the ravings of your next neighbour, as you would for a scene on the stage. All humanity will be extinguished in you. The ravings of these wretches will become at once your sport and your torture. You will watch for the sounds, to mock them with the grimaces and bellowings of a fiend. The mind has a power of accommodating itself to its situation, that you will experience in its most frightful and deplorable efficacy. Then comes the dreadful doubt of one’s own sanity, the terrible announcer that _that_ doubt will soon become fear, and _that_ fear certainty. Perhaps (still more dreadful) the _fear_ will at last become a _hope_,--shut out from society, watched by a brutal keeper, writhing with all the impotent agony of an incarcerated mind, without communication and without sympathy, unable to exchange ideas but with those whose ideas are only the hideous spectres of departed intellect, or even to hear the welcome sound of the human voice, except to mistake it for the howl of a fiend, and stop the ear desecrated by its intrusion,--then at last your fear will become a more fearful hope; you will wish to become one of them, to escape the agony of consciousness. As those who have long leaned over a precipice, have at last felt a desire to plunge below, to relieve the intolerable temptation of their giddiness(11), you will hear them laugh amid their wildest paroxysms; you will say, ‘Doubtless those wretches have some consolation, but I have none; my sanity is my greatest curse in this abode of horrors. They greedily devour their miserable meals, while I loathe mine. They sleep sometimes soundly, while my sleep is--worse than their waking. They are revived every morning by some delicious illusion of cunning madness, soothing them with the hope of escaping, baffling or tormenting their keeper; my sanity precludes all such hope. _I know I never can escape_, and the preservation of my faculties is only an aggravation of my sufferings. I have all their miseries,--I have none of their consolations. They laugh,--I hear them; would I could laugh like them.’ You will try, and the very effort will be an invocation to the demon of insanity to come and take full possession of you from that moment for ever. (11) A fact, related to me by a person who was near committing suicide in a similar situation, to escape what he called “the excruciating torture of giddiness.” (There were other details, both of the menaces and temptations employed by Melmoth, which are too horrible for insertion. One of them may serve for an instance).