There is a state which is not sleep, and yet is akin to it, into which grief can bring us,--a half-dreary stupor, where only sorrows are felt; and even they come dulled and blunted, as if time and years had softened down their sting. But no ray of hope shines there,--a dreary waste, without a star. The cold, dark sea, boundless and bleak, is not more saddening than life then seems before us; there is neither path to follow nor goal to reach, and an apathy worse than death creeps over all our faculties. And yet, when we awake we wish for this again. Into this state I sank, and when morning came felt sorry that the light should shine into my narrow cell, and rouse me from my stupor. When the turnkey entered to bring me breakfast, I turned towards the wall, and trembled lest he should speak to me; and it was with a strange thrill I heard the door close as he went out. The abandonment of one's sorrow--that daily, hourly indulgence in grief which the uncheered solitude of a prison begets--soon brings the mind to the narrow range of one or two topics. With the death of hope, all fancy and imagination perish, the springs of all speculation are dried up, and every faculty bent towards one point; the reason, like a limb unexercised, wastes and pines, and becomes paralyzed. Now and then the thought would flash across me, “What if this were madness?”--and I shuddered not at the thought. Such had my prison made me. Four days and nights passed over thus,--a long, monotonous dream, in which I counted not the time,--and I lay upon my straw bed watching the expiring light of the candle with that strange interest one attaches to everything within the limits of a prison-cell. The flame waned and flickered: now lighting up for a second the cold gray walls, scratched with many a prisoner's name; now subsiding, it threw strange and fitful shapes upon them,--figures that seemed to move and to beckon to one another,--goblin outlines, wild and fanciful. Then came a bright flash as the wick fell, and all was dark.