The Anatomy of Melancholy

Even the steadiest and most patient are swept headlong so violently by grief in such a case that men otherwise brave and sensible often forget themselves and weep like children for months together, as though they would dissolve into water, and refuse to be comforted. They are gone, they are gone.

“A black day carried them off and plunged them into an untimely grave.” What shall I do?

Who will give me a fountain for tears? Who will stir Groans deep enough, and words for bitter grief? Filial love drains my eyes and breaks my gaping Breast, nor lets me pour out all the lament I crave: So great a loss weighs upon me, and so on.

Who gives me fountains of tears, who lends me groans, Deep sighs enough to express my sorrow? My eyes are dry, my breast is torn apart; My loss is so great, I cannot mourn enough.

So Strozzi the younger, that elegant Italian poet, bewails his father’s death in his funeral lament. He could moderate his feelings in other matters, as he admits, but not in this: he yields himself wholly to sorrow.

Now, I confess, I turn my back before misfortune; that spirit fails, That once unconquerable strength and firmness of mind.

How Quintilian laments the loss of his son, almost to the point of despair! How Cardano mourns his only child in his book On His Own Books and elsewhere in many of his other writings!

How Saint Ambrose mourns his brother’s death! “Can I fail to think of you, or think of you without tears? O bitter days, O nights of weeping,” and so on. How Gregory of Nazianzus mourns that noble Pulcheria! “O beauty,” and so on; “a fresh flower, just budding,” and so on.

Alexander, a man of utterly indomitable courage, after Hephaestion’s death, as Curtius relates, “lay for three days, determined to die.” He lay on the ground for three days together, resolved to die with him, and would neither eat nor drink nor sleep.

When her son fell down dead, the woman who spoke with Ezra, 2 Esdras, chapter 10, fled into the field and would not return to the city. She resolved to remain there, neither eating nor drinking, but mourning and fasting until she died. “Rachel wept for her children and would not be comforted, because they were no more,” Matthew 2:18.

So the emperor Hadrian bewailed his Antinous; Hercules, Hylas; Orpheus, Eurydice; David, Absalom—“O my dear son Absalom!”—Augustine, his mother Monica; and Niobe, her children, so intensely that the poets imagined her turned to stone, as though numbed by the extremity of grief.

“Aegeus, appalled by the mournful signal of his son, threw himself headlong into the sea.” Unable to endure grief at his son’s death, he drowned himself.

Our recent physicians abound in such examples. Montanus, consultation 242, had a patient troubled by this disorder for many years following her husband’s death. Trincavelli, book 1, consultation 14, has another such patient, almost in despair after his mother’s death, “so that he nearly threw himself headlong,” and ready in his distraction to kill himself.