self-possession, as, on one occasion, when the jailer's attendant
rudely awoke him with a kick, as he deposited a basin of hot broth,
which Foresti indignantly seized and dashed its scalding contents into
the face of the brutal menial, who thenceforward was more respectful in
his salutations. But it was the moral suffering against which all his
wisdom and courage were invoked to struggle,--the resolute maintenance
of healthful mental activity, without an object or motive underived
from will,--the repression of hopeless, vague, self-tormenting
reverie, which perverts intellect and drains moral energy,--the
habitual exercise of memory, reflection, and fancy, to preserve their
functions unimpaired. Such expedients were of special necessity at
Spielberg; for never were educated men so barbarously deprived of the
legitimate resources of mind and heart; thought and love were left
uninvited, unappeased. Sir Walter Raleigh had the materials, at the
Tower, to write a history; Lafayette, at Olmutz, lived in perpetual
expectancy of release; Moore and Byron, children, flowers, birds, and
the Muses cheered Leigh Hunt's year of durance: but in this bleak
fortress, innocent and magnanimous men beheld the seasons come and go,
night succeed day, and year follow year, with no cognizance of kindred
or the world's doings,--no works of bard or sage,--no element of
life,--but a grim, cold, deadly routine within stone walls,--all tender
sympathies, the very breath of the soul, denied,--all influx of
knowledge, the food of the mind, prohibited, experience a blank,
existence a void!

Had we need of evidence that conscience is a normal attribute of
humanity, that the soul is endowed with relations to the Infinite, we
should find it in the self-preservation realized under such
circumstances as these. Only conscious rectitude could arm humanity
against the sense of degradation and deprivation thus surrounding and