Dead letters! does it
not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone
to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten
it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting
them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned.
Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:--the
finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note
sent in swiftest charity:--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor
hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those
who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved
calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
End of Project Gutenberg's Bartleby, The Scrivener, by Herman Melville
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