“I became insane,” he would write. “I drank—God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity. I had, indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure, when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can and do endure as becomes a man. It was the horrible, never-ending oscillation between hope and despair which I could not longer have endured, without total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I received a new but—Oh God!—how melancholy existence.”
