of
discovery.

Meantime, the guilty soul can not keep its own secret. It is false to
itself, or rather it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be
true to itself. It labors under its guilty possession, and knows not what
to do with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such an
inhabitant. It finds itself preyed on by a torment, which it dares not
acknowledge to God nor man. A vulture is devouring it, and it can ask no
sympathy or assistance either from heaven or earth. The secret which the
murderer possesses soon comes to possess him; and, like the evil spirits
of which we read, it overcomes him, and leads him whithersoever it will.
He feels it beating at his heart, rising to his throat, and demanding
disclosure. He thinks the whole world sees it in his face, reads it in his
eyes, and almost hears its workings in the very silence of his thoughts.
It has become his master. It betrays his discretion, it breaks down his
courage, it conquers his prudence. When suspicions from without begin to
embarrass him, and the net of circumstance to entangle him, the fatal
secret struggles with still greater violence to burst forth. It must be
confessed, it will be confessed; there is no refuge from confession but
suicide, and suicide is confession.
--Daniel Webster.

NOTE.--The above extract is from Daniel Webster's argument in the trial of
John F. Knapp for the murder of Mr. White, a very wealthy and respectable
citizen of Salem, Mass, Four persons were arrested as being concerned in
the conspiracy; one confessed the plot and all the details of the crime,
implicating the others, but he afterwards refused to testify in court. The
man who, by this confession, was the actual murderer, committed suicide,
and Mr. Webster's assistance was obtained in prosecuting the others. John
F. Knapp was convicted as principal, and the other two as accessaries in
the murder.

C. THE CLOSING YEAR. (355)

George Denison Prentice, 1802-1870, widely known as a political writer, a
poet, and a wit, was born in Preston, Connecticut, and graduated at Brown
University in 1823. He studied law, but never practiced his profession. He
edited a paper in Hartford for two years; and, in 1831, he became editor
of the "Louisville Journal," which position he held for nearly forty
years. As an editor, Mr. Prentice was an able, and sometimes bitter,
political partisan, abounding in w