Certainly there are men of exceptional endowments—beings whose intellectual and spiritual faculties have been developed to the highest degree—who, when not pursuing more elevated pleasures, find inordinate delight in the morbid—the macabre—the violent—and the grotesque. For the sake of convenience, I shall use myself as an exemplar. That pleasure which is the most purely stimulating to my soul is derived from the prolonged contemplation of Ideal Beauty, as it is embodied in the sublimities of great music, in supreme works of painting, and in the poetry of a handful of authors, whose number includes Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, and (with certain significant caveats which I shall refrain, for the sake of concision, from enumerating at this juncture) Coleridge.

And yet there are other, almost equally cherished, moments when nothing affords me deeper pleasure than to meditate on the most dire and abominable of calamities: on the Earthquake at Lisbon—the Plague of London—the Massacre of St. Bartholomew—the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta—the unspeakable depredations of the Spanish Inquisition. In short, while acutely, if not painfully, sensitive to the excitation of what may be termed the Poetic Sentiment, I have ever derived an altogether different, though scarcely less extreme, satisfaction from themes having to do with atrocity, bloodshed, and horror.

It must not be supposed, however, that—in confessing to a fascination with such dark and gruesome matters—I intend to portray myself as a man of vicious and depraved temperament. For—even while printed accounts of unspeakable enormities and unpardonable crimes can suffuse my soul with a dreadful, if delicious, excitation—the actual sight of human suffering in any of its manifold forms is and has ever been a source of the most unmitigated dismay and revulsion. Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly mysterious for solution! To read—to think—to dream—about the torments of Christian martyrs, the autos-da-fé of Toledo, the fiendish ingenuities of the medieval torture-dungeons has, since the days of my earliest boyhood, constituted a cherished and beguiling pastime. But to witness, at first hand, an act of extreme physical cruelty or violence is a horror from which my soul utterly and instinctively recoils.

In light of the foregoing observations, it will come as no surprise to the reader that the appalling murder of Henrietta Nicodemus—taking place only several feet away from my horror-struck eyes—affected me so adversely that I was plunged into a state of profound insensibility. Although I had frequently pondered the subject of decapitation—perusing various gruesome accounts, for example, of the executions of Charles I and other notables who had been dispatched by this time-honored means—nothing had prepared me for the hideous actuality of seeing a fellow-human beheaded.