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Rh deserted me. I passed hastily through the close and narrow streets around my home. Dizzy, confused with the excitement of despair, I was startled by the hour striking one, two, three, four. I was standing before the illuminated clock of St. Bride’s. Mockery, thus to trace the progress of time in light! mark it rather by shadows dark and heavy as its own. Half an hour would bring me to Waterloo Bridge, and there I could offer up the fearful sacrifice Fate demanded from Necessity." From this period we already know the story, and need not follow Charles in his narrative of the small causes which had deterred him from the act, to the wild hope, or rather curiosity, which now induced him to wait for the morrow. "I have no choice," said he at last; "between myself and the past there is a wide gulf; I cannot again unite quiet industry and enthusiastic energy; I can no longer merge the actual present in the imagined future. A bitter feeling of envy rankles within me. I do not say that there is nothing worth living for, but that there is nothing within my reach. I am weary of this life of literary drudgery, whose toil is so incessant, and whose reward is so distant. I am stung to the very soul by the criticisms on what I have already done. The praise does not gratify me, because it is that of kindness, or of motive, instead of appreciation; the censure mortifies me,—even while I deny its truth; but I say, what is opinion, when the smallest pique against