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MISANTHROPY AND REPENTANCE.
August 3d, Nine O'clock P.M.
There are days when everything appears gloomy to us; the world, like the sky, is covered by a dark fog.

Nothing seems in its place; we see only misery, improvidence, and cruelty; the world seems without God, and given up to all the evils of chance.
Yesterday I was in this unhappy humor.

After a long walk in the faubourgs, I returned home, sad and dispirited.
Everything I had seen seemed to accuse the civilization of which we are so proud! I had wandered into a little by-street, with which I was not acquainted, and I found myself suddenly in the middle of those dreadful abodes where the poor are born, to languish and die.

I looked at those decaying walls, which time has covered with a foul leprosy; those windows, from which dirty rags hang out to dry; those fetid gutters, which coil along the fronts of the houses like venomous reptiles! I felt oppressed with grief, and hastened on.
A little farther on I was stopped by the hearse of a hospital; a dead man, nailed down in his deal coffin, was going to his last abode, without funeral pomp or ceremony, and without followers.