xecution of the picture of the Christian
is not much better--it is too much to use, in the sense here given to
them, no fewer than three verbs--"pales"--"rolls"--"starts," in four
lines.

"The hope Religion pillows on his heart,"

is not a good line, and it is a borrowed one.

"When with a dying hand he waves adieu,"

conveys an unnatural image. Dying men do not act so. Not thus are taken
eternal farewells. The motion in the sea-song was more natural--

"She waved adieu, and kiss'd her lily hand."

"_Weeps so true_," means nothing, nor is it English. The grammar is not
good of,

"He _pants for where_ congenial spirits"--

Neither is the word _pants_ by any means the right one; and in such an
awful crisis, admire who may the simile of the infant longing for its
mother's breast, we never can in its present shape; while there is the
line,

"Turns to his God, _and sighs his soul away_;"

a prettiness we very much dislike--alter one word, and it would be
voluptuous--nor do we hesitate to call the passage a puling one
altogether, and such as ought to be expunged from all paper.

But that is not all we have to say against it--it is radically and
essentially bad, because it either proves nothing of what it is meant to
prove--or what no human being on earth ever disputed. Be fair--be just
in all that concerns religion. Take the best--the most moral, if the
word can be used--the most enlightened Sceptic, and the true Christian,
and compare their deathbeds. That of the Sceptic will be disturbed or
disconsolate--that of the Christian confiding or blessed. But to
contrast the deathbed of an absolute maniac, muttering curses, gnashing
and scowling, and "raising a hideous shriek," and "rounding his eyes
with a ghastly glare," and convulsed, too, with severe bodily
throes--with that of a convinced, confiding, and conscientious
Christian, a calm, meek, undoubting believer, happy in the "hope
religion pillows on his heart," and enduring no fleshly agonies, can
serve no purpose under the sun. Men who have the misery of being
unbelievers, are at all times to be pitied--most of all in their last
hours; but though theirs be then dim melancholy, or dark despair, they
express neither the one state nor the other by mutterings, curses, and
hideous shrieks. Such a wretch there may sometimes be--like him "who
died and made no sign;" but there is no more sense in seeking to
brighten the character of the Christian b