It will often happen that what ought to turn the human mind from some
peculiar tendency produces the opposite effect. One would think that
the perusal in the newspaper of some crime and capital punishment
would warn away all who had ever meditated the crime, or dreaded the
chance of detection. Yet it is well known to us that many a criminal
is made by pondering over the fate of some predecessor in guilt. There
is a fascination in the Dark and Forbidden, which, strange to say, is
only lost in fiction. No man is more inclined to murder his nephews,
or stifle his wife, after reading Richard the Third or Othello. It is
the _reality_ that is necessary to constitute the danger of contagion.
Now, it was this reality in the fate, and life, and crowning suicide
of Chatterton, that forced itself upon Leonard's thoughts, and sat
there like a visible evil thing, gathering evil like cloud around it.
There was much in the dead poet's character, his trials, and his doom,
that stood out to Leonard like a bold and colossal shadow of himself
and his fate. Alas! the bookseller, in one respect, had said truly.
Leonard came back to him the next day a new man, and it seemed even to
himself as if he had lost a good angel in losing Helen. "Oh that she
had been by my side," thought he. "Oh that I could have felt the touch
of her confiding hand--that, looking up from the scathed and dreary
ruin of this life, that had sublimely lifted itself from the plain,
and sought to tower aloft from a deluge, her mild look had spoken to
me of innocent, humble, unaspiring childhood! Ah! If indeed I were
still necessary to her--still the sole guardian and protector--then
could I say to myself, 'Thou must not despair and die! Thou hast her
to live and to strive for.' But no, no! Only this vast and terrible
London--the solitude of the dreary garret, and those lustrous eyes
glaring alike through the throng and through the solitude."