anomalous? Yet the sun and the moon rise and set as usual upon the
mightiest revolutions of empire and of worldly fortune that this planet
ever beholds; and it is sometimes even a comfort to know that this will
be the case. A great criminal, sentenced to an agonizing punishment,
has derived a fortitude and a consolation from recollecting that the
day would run its inevitable course--that a day after all was
_but_ a day--that the mighty wheel of alternate light and darkness
must and would revolve--and that the evening star would rise as usual,
and shine with its untroubled lustre upon the dust and ashes of what
_had_ indeed suffered, and so recently, the most bitter pangs, but
would then have ceased to suffer. 'La Journee,' said Damien,

'La journee sera dure, mais elle se passera.'

'----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my
day also, my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will
have an end; that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so
long as I thought at all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching,
when thinking in any shape would for some time be at an end for me.

That day, as the morning advanced, I went again, accompanied by Hannah,
to the police court and to the prison--a vast, ancient, in parts
ruinous, and most gloomy pile of building. In those days the
administration of justice was, if not more corrupt, certainly in its
inferior departments by far more careless than it is at present, and
liable to thousands of interruptions and mal-practices, supporting
themselves upon old traditionary usages which required at least half a
century, and the shattering everywhere given to old systems by the
French Revolution, together with the universal energy of mind applied
to those subjects over the whole length and breadth of Christendom, to