chrisrohlev1234 's review for:

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

5.0

---

"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 dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cartload they are annually burned. Sometimes from out of the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring- the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders 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."