"Ah Life, my own Libido, my Despair, my Guilt, my Need, a Glory, a Mocking, a Hope."  The cover of Lenoir-Rhyne's 1968 yearbook.

Black cats sense despair in clowns and, in a way that is difficult to measure, "feed" off it.  From Lustige Blätter, 1899.

"Anguish, with apocalyptic NEVER."  From Lady Geraldine's Courtship by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and illustrated by W. J. Hennessy, 1870.

How true those words are, even today: "Take care you don't fall in."  From Wolfenberg by William Black, 1893.

Here you'll find either a bang or a whimper: my collection of vintage end of the world imagery.

"With a wild, ringing, piercing cry, she utters aloud her lover's name in a clarion call of warning, and adjuration, and despair."  From A Veldt Official by Bertram Mitford, 1895.

From Ballou's Monthly Magazine, 1886.

"He threw himself on a pile of cushions."  From Fairy Tales in Other Lands by Julie Goddard, 1892.

You've heard of a "kernel of despair."  One finds it "When the corn is ripe."  From The Temperance Mirror, 1895.

"How long?  How long?  This heart-breaking monotony?  This wretched pay?"  From Popular Mechanics, 1934.

"No—I can't go on.  We're shut in.  Oh, my god—"  From Pearson's, 1911.