stinction for the opposite qualities; while others, remarkable at
first for calmness and courage, suddenly giving way, without any fresh
cause of despair, seemed afterwards to cast their minds as they did
their bodies, prostrate before the danger.

It would not, perhaps, be difficult to account for these apparent
anomalies; but I shall content myself with simply stating the facts,
adding to them one of a similar description that sensibly affected my
own mind.

Some of the soldiers near me having casually remarked that the sun was
setting, I looked round, and never can I forget the intensity with which
I regarded his declining rays. I had previously felt deeply impressed
with the conviction that that night the ocean was to be my bed; and had,
I imagined, sufficiently realized to my mind, both the last struggles
and the consequences of death. But as I continued solemnly watching the
departing beams of the sun, the thought that that was really the very
last I should ever behold, gradually expanded into reflections the most
tremendous in their import. It was not, I am persuaded, either the
retrospect of a past life, or the direct fear of death or of judgment,
that occupied my mind at the period I allude to; but a broad,
illimitable view of eternity itself, altogether abstracted from the
misery or felicity that flows through it--a sort of painless,
pleasureless, sleepless eternity. I know not whither the overwhelming
thought would have hurried me, had I not speedily seized, as with the
grasp of death, on some of those sweet promises of the gospel which give
to an immortal existence its only charms; and that naturally enough led
back my thoughts, by means of the brilliant object before me, to the
contemplation of that blessed city, "which hath no need of the sun,
neither of the moon to shine in it; for the glory of God doth lighten
it, and the Lamb is the light thereof."

I have been the more particular in recording my precise feelings at the
period in question, because they tend to confirm an opinion which I have
long entertained--in common, I believe, with others,--that we very
rarely realize even those objects that seem, in our every-day
speculations, to be the most interesting to our hearts. We are so much
in the habit of uttering the awful words 'Almighty,' 'heaven,' 'hell,'
'eternity,' 'divine justice,' 'holiness,' etc., without attaching to
them, in all their magnitude, the ideas of which such words are the
symbols,