soul but in a good condition, and were I but sure of it, ah I how rich
should I esteem myself, though blessed but with bread and water! I
should count these but small afflictions, and should bear them as little
burdens. 'A wounded spirit who can bear!'"

He looked with envy, as he wandered through the country, upon the birds
in the trees, the hares in the preserves, and the fishes in the streams.
They were happy in their brief existence, and their death was but a
sleep. He felt himself alienated from God, a discord in the harmonies of
the universe. The very rooks which fluttered around the old church spire
seemed more worthy of the Creator's love and care than himself. A vision
of the infernal fire, like that glimpse of hell which was afforded to
Christian by the Shepherds, was continually before him, with its
"rumbling noise, and the cry of some tormented, and the scent of
brimstone." Whithersoever he went, the glare of it scorched him, and its
dreadful sound was in his ears. His vivid but disturbed imagination lent
new terrors to the awful figures by which the sacred writers conveyed the
idea of future retribution to the Oriental mind. Bunyan's World of Woe,
if it lacked the colossal architecture and solemn vastness of Milton's
Pandemonium, was more clearly defined; its agonies were within the pale
of human comprehension; its victims were men and women, with the same
keen sense of corporeal suffering which they possessed in life; and who,
to use his own terrible description, had "all the loathed variety of hell
to grapple with; fire unquenchable, a lake of choking brimstone, eternal
chains, darkness more black than night, the everlasting gnawing of the
worm, the sight of devils, and the yells and outcries of the damned."

His mind at this period was evidently shaken in some degree from its
balance. He was troubled with strange, wicked thoughts, confused by
doubts and blasphemous suggestions, for which he could only account by