Word: facings
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...curiously inquire. If the fishes leave anything, we shall probably hear of it from the officers of the Morgue. A dark, heavily veiled figure is pacing the Pont Neuf slowly and irresolutely. A human soul has been delivered over to the worm that dieth not. A sweet face is wan and pinched with agony; two wild eyes gaze down into the cold, whirling, gurgling water; there is a cry of despair, a frantic leap,-and a lost soul has rushed unsummoned to meet a just God. Next day the body is found floating, and brought to the Morgue...
...fancy seizes us to follow one of its victims on his wandering journey from the time when he enters the river to that when he is lifted from its bosom and borne to face the jostling crowd before the glass. How gaily the body floats! The last spark of life is extinct, the jaw has fallen, the eyes are glazed the limbs dangle listlessly abroad. What need of haste? It has plenty of time. It ventures out timidly toward the middle current. No one notices the livid face, floating like a mask upon the yellow Seine. Now it sinks...
Suddenly, chancing to look over towards one of the windows during an unusually sharp blast of the sleet outside, I saw a face peering through the pane. I could not jump,-for lack of salutatory machinery,-but a thrill went through me It was my own face. It was thrust stealthily forward out of the darkness into the light of the window,-and had a look of meanness and cruelty which I would put my eyes out rather than see again. The remembrance of that distorted likeness gives me, even now, a feeling of terror and shame...
...kill them. And it did kill them while I stood by in a gony. I shall not attempt to describe the murder, for the details of it are confused with recollections of what I had just been reading in De Quincey. What I remember most is my own face glancing at me, as the murder went on, with looks of mockery and hate. Then the room suddenly filled with people. I recollect the chill of fear I felt as the instinct of self preservation rushed over my mind. Then with body and soul no longer separate, but united, I know...
...have an influence on conduct such as is exercised by all religious and philosophical beliefs. It may sanction certain acts and practices and condemn others; it may encourage certain states of mind. Thus we can conceive that if all the world turned fatalist, we might see our good people face life with a little more calmness and intrepidity; we might expect to find less self-accusation and less of what is called righteous indignation. For if we came to regard wickedness as misfortune and monstrosity rather than sin, we should not find it necessary to be so vehement...