Lessmann who, at a later time, hanged himself, wrote the humorous _Diary of a Melancholiac_ (1834). Tasso, in his letter to the Duke of Urbino, and in the stanza already quoted, clearly depicted his own insanity. “Francesco,” he says elsewhere, “O Francesco, within my infirm limbs I have an infirm soul.”[445] It is a curious fact that, shortly before his first attack of mania, he wrote these words, “As I do not deny that I am mad, I must believe that my madness has been caused by drunkenness or love, since I know well that I drink to excess,” &c.[446] Dostoïeffsky continually introduces semi-insane characters, and especially epileptics, in _Besi_ and _The Idiot_, and moral lunatics in _Crime and Punishment_. Gérard de Nerval was the author of _Aurelia_, which has been well called the “Song of Songs of Fever,” and is a mixture of poetry and gibberish. Barbara wrote _Les Détraqués_. Buston described his own hallucinations. Allix, though not a medical man, wrote on the treatment of the insane. Lenau, twelve years before he actually succumbed to the attacks of insanity, had foreseen and described it. All his poems depict, in colours painfully vivid, suicidal and melancholic tendencies. The reader may judge of this from the mere titles of some of his lyrics, “To a Hypochrondriac,” “The Madman,” “The Diseased in Soul,” “The Violence of a Dream,” “The Moon of Melancholy.” I do not think that it is possible to find, in the most doleful pages of J. Ortis so accurate and vividly coloured a description of suicidal tendencies as in the following extract from the _Seelenkranke_, “I carry a deep wound in my heart, and will carry it in silence to the grave; my life is broken from hour to hour. One alone could comfort me, ... but she lies in the grave.... O my mother! let thyself be moved by my entreaties, if thy love still survives death, if it is still permitted thee to care for thy child.... Oh! let me soon escape from life! I long for the night of death! Oh! only help thy crazy son to lay aside his grief.” His _Traumgewalten_ is, as I have already observed, a terribly truthful picture of that hallucination which preceded or accompanied the first attack of suicidal mania; and here the reader can easily trace in the phrases and ideas that disconnected and fragmentary character which is the mark of the delirious paralytic. Here is a specimen--“The dream was so terrible, so wild, so frightful, that I wish I could tell myself it was nothing but a dream; ... yet I continue to weep, and to feel that my heart beats; I awaken, and find the sheets and the pillow wet.... Did I seize them in my dream and wipe my face? I do not know.... While I was sleeping, my hostile guests have been holding an orgy here.... Now they are gone, those savages, they are gone, but I find their traces in my tears. They have fled, and left the wine on the table,” &c.