Olivier Dalibard. Let him
who but lives through the senses, spreads the wings of the fancy in
the gaudy glare of enjoyment corrupted, avid to seize, and impatient
to toil, whose faculties are curbed but to the range of physical
perception, whose very courage is but the strength of the nerves, who
develops but the animal as he stifles the man,--let him gaze on the
villany of Varney, and startle to see some magnified shadow of himself
thrown dimly on the glass! Let those who, with powers to command and
passions to wing the powers, would sweep without scruple from the aim to
the end, who, trampling beneath their footprint of iron the humanities
that bloom up in their path, would march to success with the proud
stride of the destroyer, hear, in the laugh of yon maniac murderess, the
glee of the fiend they have wooed to their own souls! Guard well, O Heir
of Eternity, the portal of sin,--the thought! From the thought to the
deed, the subtler thy brain and the bolder thy courage, the briefer
and straighter is the way. Read these pages in disdain of
self-commune,--they shall revolt thee, not instruct; read them, looking
steadfastly within,--and how humble soever the art of the narrator, the
facts he narrates, like all history, shall teach by example. Every human
act, good or ill, is an angel to guide or to warn; and the deeds of the
worst have messages from Heaven to the listening hearts of the best.
Amidst the glens in the Apennine, in the lone wastes of Calabria, the
sign of the cross marks the spot where a deed of violence has been done;
on all that pass by the road, the symbol has varying effect: sometimes
it startles the conscience, sometimes it invokes the devotion; the
robber drops the blade, the priest counts the rosary. So is it with the
record of crime; and in the witness of Guilt, Man is thrilled with the
whisper of Religion.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, The fatal shadows that walk by
us still. FLETCHER.

End of Project Gutenberg's Lucretia, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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