e latter--that might, be almost said to neutralize its own
inflictions. In the other, the approach was comparatively so slow and
gradual, that all the sympathies and afflictions were allowed full
and painful time to reach the utmost limits of human suffering, and
to endure the wasting series of those struggles and details which
long illness, surrounded by destitution and affliction, never fails to
inflict. In the cholera, there was no time left to feel--the passions
were wrenched and stunned by a blow, which was over, one may say,
before it could be perceived; while in the wide-spread but more tedious
desolation of typhus, the heart was left to brood over the thousand
phases of love and misery which the terrible realities of the one,
joined to the alarming exaggerations of the other, never failed to
present. In cholera, a few hours, and all was over; but in the awful
fever which then prevailed, there was the gradual approach--the
protracted illness--the long nights of racking pain--day after day of
raging torture--and the dark period of uncertainty when the balance of
human life hangs in the terrible equilibrium of suspense--all requiring
the exhibition of constant attention--of the eye whose affection
never sleeps--the ear that is deaf only to every sound but the moan
of pain--the touch whose tenderness is felt as a solace, so long as
suffering itself is conscious--the pressure of the aching head--the
moistening of the parched and burning lips--and the numerous and
indescribable offices of love and devotedness, which always encompass,
or should encompass, the bed of sickness and of death. There was, we
say, all this, and much more than the imagination itself, unaided by
a severe acquaintance with the truth, could embody in its gloomiest
conceptions.

In fact, Ireland during the season, or rather the year, we are
describing, might be compared to one vast lazar-house filled with
famine, disease and death. The very skies of Heaven were hung with the
black drapery of the grave; for never since, nor within the memory of
man before it, did the clouds present shapes of such gloomy and funereal
import. Hearses, coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark
emblems of mortality were reflected, as it were, on the sky, from the
terrible work of pestilence and famine, which was going forward on the
earth beneath them. To all this, the thunder and lightning too, were
constantly adding their angry peals, and flashing, as if ut