calling up beauty where it fell; or mark at night, through his high and
narrow casement, the stars aloof, and the sweet moon pouring in her
light, like God's pardon, even through the dungeon-gloom and the desolate
scenes where Mortality struggles with Despair; he could not catch,
obstructed as they were, these, the benigner influences of earth, and not
sicken and pant for his old and full communion with their ministry and
presence. Sometimes all around him was forgotten, the harsh cell, the
cheerless solitude, the approaching trial, the boding fear, the darkened
hope, even the spectre of a troubled and fierce remembrance,--all was
forgotten, and his spirit was abroad, and his step upon the mountain-top
once more.

In our estimate of the ills of life, we never sufficiently take into our
consideration the wonderful elasticity of our moral frame, the unlooked
for, the startling facility with which the human mind accommodates itself
to all change of circumstance, making an object and even a joy from the
hardest and seemingly the least redeemed conditions of fate. The man who
watched the spider in his cell, may have taken, at least, as much
interest in the watch, as when engaged in the most ardent and ambitious
objects of his former life; and he was but a type of his brethren; all in
similar circumstances would have found some similar occupation. Let any
man look over his past life, let him recall not moments, not hours of
agony, for to them Custom lends not her blessed magic; but let him single
out some lengthened period of physical or moral endurance; in hastily
reverting to it, it may seem at first, I grant, altogether wretched; a
series of days marked with the black stone,--the clouds without a star;--
but let him look more closely, it was not so during the time of
suffering; a thousand little things, in the bustle of life dormant and
unheeded, then started froth into notice, and became to him objects of
interest or diversion; the dreary present, once made familiar, glided