For suicide, however, some of the
papers substituted murder, though of neither was there an atom of
actual proof. On the day following, three persons died by their own
hands in Berlin, of whom two were young members of the medical
profession; on the day following that, the number rose to nineteen,
Hamburg, Dresden, and Aachen joining in the frenzied death-dance;
within three weeks from the night on which Professor Schleschinger met
his unaccountable end, eight thousand persons in Germany, France, and
Great Britain, died in that startlingly sudden and secret manner which
we call 'tragic', many of them obviously by their own hands, many, in
what seemed the servility of a fatal imitativeness, with figured,
honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues. Even now--now,
after years--I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but to
live through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere,
all vapid with the suffocating death--ah, it was terror too deep,
nausea too foul, for mortal bearing. Novalis has somewhere hinted at
the possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide and
voluntary return by the whole human family into the sweet bosom of our
ancient Father--I half expected it was coming, had come, _then_.
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