A wail, a chant, louder and louder yet; Do spirits come and fetch them? What are these, As 't were her nightly posture, through the crowd But breathes she not? and her lips move! - how heavenly sweet! "O, no!" replied the dame, wiping her tears, Death, when we meet the spectre in our walks, Knocks at the heart. His form and fashion here To me, I do confess, reflect a gloom, A sadness round; yet one I would not lose ; In this, this land of shadows, where we live "Stand, I conjure ye!" What are the greatest? Seen thus destitute, They must speak beyond A thousand homilies. When RAPHAEL went, His last great work; 240 when, entering in, they looked Now on the dead, then on that masterpiece, 241 Now on his face, lifeless and colorless, Then on those forms divine that lived and breathed, NATIONAL PREJUDICES. "ANOTHER assassination! This venerable city," I exclaimed, "what is it, but as it began, a nest of robbers and murderers? We must away at sunrise, Luigi.” — But before sunrise I had reflected a little, and in the soberest prose. My indignation was gone; and, when Luigi undrew my curtain, crying, "Up, signor, up! The horses are at the gate!" "Luigi," I replied, "if thou lovest me, draw the curtain." 242 It would lessen very much the severity with which men judge of each other, if they would but trace effects to their causes, and observe the progress of things in the moral as accurately as in the physical world. When we condemn millions in the mass as vindictive and sanguinary, we should remember that wherever justice is ill-administered the injured will redress themselves. Robbery provokes to robbery; murder to assassination. Resentments become hereditary; and what began in disorder ends as if all hell had broke loose. Laws create a habit of self-restraint, not only by the influence of fear, but by regulating in its exercise the passion of revenge. If they overawe the bad by the prospect of a punishment certain and well-defined, they console the injured by the infliction of that punishment; and, as the infliction is a public act, it excites and entails no enmity. The laws are offended; and the community for its own sake and overtakes the offender, often without the conpursues currence of the sufferer, sometimes against his wishes.249 Now, those who were not born, like ourselves, to such advantages, we should, surely, rather pity than hate; and when, at length, they venture to turn against their rulers," we should lament, not wonder at, their excesses; remembering that nations are naturally patient and long-suffering, and seldom rise in rebellion till they are so degraded by a bad government as to be almost incapable of a good one. "Hate them, perhaps," you may say, "we should not; but despise them we must, if enslaved, like the people of ROME, in mind as well as body; if their religion be a gross and barbarous superstition."- I respect knowledge; but I do not despise ignorance. They think only as their fathers thought, worship as they worshipped. They do no more; and, if ours had not burst their bondage, braving imprisonment and death, might not we at this very moment have been exhibiting, in our streets and our churches, the same processions, ceremonials, and mortifications? Nor should we require from those who are in an earlier stage of society what belongs to a later. They are only where we once were; and why hold them in derision? It is their business to cultivate the inferior arts before they think of the more refined; and in many of the last what are we as a nation, when compared to others that have passed away? Unfortunately it is too much the practice of governments to nurse and keep alive in the governed their national prejudices. It withdraws their attention from what is passing at home, and makes them better tools in the hands of ambition. Hence, next-door neighbors are held up to us from our childhood as natural enemies; and we are urged on like curs to worry each other.245 In like manner we should learn to be just to individuals. Who can say, "In such circumstances I should have done otherwise?" Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange concurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many self-accusations, how many sighs, how many tears, who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone? Happily these things are known to Him from whom no secrets are hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments THE CAMPAGNA OF ROME. HAVE none appeared as tillers of the ground,247 Was the last plough a Roman's? From this seat, 249 248 Sacred for ages, whence, as VIRGIL sings, Revolving, as we rest on the green turf, The changes from that hour when he from TROY |