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 sate 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."