one indulged in an
almost unbroken slumber, never awaken to scourge his hardened spirit
with her whip of snakes, and raise the gloomy curtain that concealed
from him the dark and tumultuous fires that await premeditated guilt and
impenitence? We answer, he was man. Sometimes, especially in the solemn
hours of night, he experienced brief periods, not of remorse, much
less of repentance, but of dark, diabolical guilt--conscious guilt,
unmitigated by either penitence or remorse, as might have taught his
daughter, could she have known them, how little she herself suffered in
comparison with him. These dreadful moments remind one of the heavings
of some mighty volcano, when occasioned by the internal stragglings of
the fire that is raging within it, the power and fury of which may
be estimated by the terrible glimpses which rise up, blazing and
smouldering from its stormy crater.

"What am I about?" he would say. "What a black prospect does life
present to me! I fear I am a bad man. Could it be possible now, that
there are thousands of persons in life who have committed great crimes
in the face of society, who, nevertheless, are not responsible for half
my guilt? Is it possible that a man may pass through the world, looking
on it with a plausible aspect, and yet become, from the natural iniquity
of his disposition and the habitual influence of present and perpetual
evil within him, a man of darker and more extended guilt than the
murderer or robber? Is it, then, the isolated crime, the crime that
springs from impulse, or passion, or provocation, or revenge?--or is it
the black unbroken iniquity of the spirit, that constitutes the greater
offence, or the greater offender against society? Am I, then, one of I
those reprobates of life in whom there is everything adverse to good and
friendly to evil, yet who pass through existence with a high head, and
look upon the public criminal and felon with abhorrence or affected
compassion? But why investigate myself? Here I am; and that fact is the
utmost limit to which my inquiries and investigations can go. I am what
I am: besides, I did not form nor create myself. I am different from my
daughter, she is different from me. I am different from most people. In
what? May I not have a destined purpose in creation to fulfil; and is it
not probable that my natural disposition has been bestowed upon me for
the purpose of fulfilling it? Yet if all were right, how account
for these dreadful and