“As the chill dews of evening were surrounding our bivouac,” says the author of the “Recollections of the Peninsula,” “a staff officer, with a courier, came galloping into it, and alighted at the quarters of our general. It was soon known amongst us that a severe and sanguinary action had been fought by our brother soldiers at Talavera. Disjointed rumours spoke of a dear-bought field, a heavy loss, and a subsequent retreat. I well remember how we all gathered round our fires to listen, to conjecture, and to talk about this glorious, but bloody event. We regretted that we had borne no share in the honours of such a day; and _we talked with an undefined pleasure about the carnage_. Yes! strange as it may appear, soldiers, and not they alone, talk of the danger of battle fields with a sensation which partakes of pleasure.” A watchmaker of Aberdeen, who had been looking over the precipices of Loch-na-Gair, suddenly felt a desire to precipitate himself from the height, and having first taken a step or two back for the purpose, he flung himself off. A gentleman travelling through Switzerland, with his wife, came to an eminence commanding an extensive and beautiful view of the surrounding country. He went, accompanied by his wife, to the edge of a mountainous cliff, and, turning round to his lady, he observed—“I have lived long enough!” and in a moment threw himself down the precipice. It was a notion of this kind which induced Lord Byron to observe that he believed no man ever took a razor into his hand who did not at the same time think how easily he might sever the silver cord of life. The noble poet evidently alludes, in the following stanzas, to the strange and unaccountable influence of fascination in exciting the mind to commit suicide:— “A sleep without dreams, after a rough day Of toil, is what we covet most, and yet How clay shrinks back from more quiescent clay! The very suicide that pays his debts At once, without instalments, (an old way Of paying debts, which creditors regret,) Lets out impatiently his rushing breath, Less from disgust of life than dread of death. ’Tis round him, near him, there, everywhere; And there’s a courage which grows out of fear, Perhaps of all most desperate, which will dare The _worst_ to know it:—when the mountains rear Their peaks beneath your human foot, and there You look down o’er the precipice, and drear The gulf of rock yawns,—you can’t gaze a minute Without an awful wish to plunge within it! ’Tis true, you don’t—but, pale and struck with terror, Retire: but look into your past impression! And you will find, though shuddering at the mirror Of your own thoughts, in all their self-confession, The lurking bias, be it truth or error, To the _unknown_; a secret prepossession, To plunge with all your fears—but where? You know not, And that’s the reason why you do—or do not.”