Critical and Miscellaneous Essays Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1842 Excerpt: ...of darkness, hunting and hunted to despair and death Fear cannot live in youth's bosom; and gay and glad we penetrated, like a young bird that loves the sunshine of the open sky, yet dreads not to drop down, or dart into the black forest gloom--into the haunts where the old gray grim Iniquity had, from time immemorial, established his strongholds. The ruffian's scowl fell off our face, like darkness from a new-trimmed lamp, of which the oil failed not--our eye, which neither grief nor guilt had clouded, made that of the robber, the burglar, and the murderer to quail--convicts even then to conscience, and doomed to die on the scaffold--curses and execrations passed by our heads like blasts by the top of the strong young trees. And will law, bloody penal law, quell crimes in such hearts as these, or strike their hands with palsy? Shall the hangman terrify, when conscience is a bugbear? Other ministers must disarm the murderers. Another light than the torch in the iron grasp of criminal justice discovering and dragging the felon from his haunt, must penetrate and dispel the darkness, till it is as broad as day, and (herein wickedness can hatch and hide no more--the light of mercy, and the jurisprudence of the New Testament. But on reascending from the dolorous region into the blessed day, there was the dome of St Paul's in heaven, or there the holy Abbey, where sleep England's holiest dead, and the Thames, with all his floating glories, moored or adrifting with the tide down to the sea, like giants rejoicing to run a race to the uttermost parts of the earth How dreamlike the Sowings of the Isis by Godstow's ivied ruin, where blossomed, bloomed, and perished in an hour, Rosamunda--flower of the world How cheerful, as if waked from a dream, glides on the famo...