ther hear or see; and holy Conscience,
hearing through a confused sound, and seeing through an obscure light,
fears to condemn, when perhaps she ought only to pity--to judge another,
when perhaps it is her duty but to use that inward eye for her own
delinquencies. He, then, who designs to benefit his kind by strains of
high instruction, will turn from the deathbed of the famous Wit, whose
brilliant fancy hath waxed dim as that of the clown--whose malignant
heart is quaking beneath the Power it had so long derided, with terrors
over which his hated Christian triumphs--and whose intellect, once so
perspicacious that it could see but too well the motes that are in the
sun, the specks and stains that are in the flowing robe of nature
herself--prone, in miserable contradiction to its better being, to turn
them as proofs against the power and goodness of the Holy One who
inhabiteth eternity--is now palsy-stricken as that of an idiot, and
knows not even the sound of the name of its once vain and proud
possessor--when crowded theatres had risen up with one rustle to honour,
and then, with deafening acclamations,

"Raised a mortal to the skies!"

There he is--it matters not now whether on down or straw--stretched,
already a skeleton, and gnashing--may it be in senselessness, for
otherwise what pangs are these!--gnashing his teeth, within lips once so
eloquent, now white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore
so musical, grinning ghastly like the fleshless face of fear-painted
death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of
God of all His beams?--with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of
the Cross?--with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood
and water came from the wound in His blessed side?--with wit, to drive
away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the
stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection?--with wit, to
deride the ineffable glory of transfigured Godhead on the Mount, and the
sweet and solemn semblance of the Man Jesus in the garden?--with wit, to
darken all the decrees of Providence?--and with wit,

"To shut the gates of Mercy on mankind?"

Nor yet will the Christian poet long dwell in his religious strains,
though awhile he may linger there, "and from his eyelids wipe the tears
that sacred pity hath engendered," beside the dying couch of Jean Jaques
Rousseau--a couch of turf beneath trees--for he was ever a lover of