The bones softened and dissolved away,
refusing their frail support to the flesh that covered them. The flesh
itself grew thinner and more lifeless every day, for the organs of
nutrition denied their office of assimilation. The lungs, cramped into
a space too narrow, and not sound themselves, expanded with difficulty.
With difficulty the heart freed itself from the lymph with which a slow
absorption burdened it. The blood, which ill renewed itself in the hard
and painful respiration, returned cold, pale, and sluggish to the
enfeebled veins. And in fine, the whole mysterious circle of life,
moving with such great effort, seemed from moment to moment about to
pause forever. Perhaps the great cerebral sponge, beginning and end of
that mysterious circle, had prepotently sucked up all the vital forces,
and itself consumed in a brief time all that was meant to suffice the
whole system for a long period. However it may be, the life of Leopardi
was not a course, as in most men, but truly a precipitation toward death."
Some years before he died, Leopardi had a presentiment of his death,
and his end was perhaps hastened by the nervous shock of the terror
produced by the cholera, which was then raging in Naples. At that time
the body of a Neapolitan minister of state who had died of cholera
was cast into the common burial-pit at Naples--such was the fear of
contagion, and so rapidly were the dead hurried to the grave.
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