into the woods, and left to the tender mercies of Indians and
wolves.]

All this is pleasant enough now; we can laugh at the Doctor and his
demons; but little matter of laughter was it to the victims on Salem
Hill; to the prisoners in the jails; to poor Giles Corey, tortured with
planks upon his breast, which forced the tongue from his mouth and his
life from his old, palsied body; to bereaved and quaking families; to a
whole community, priest-ridden and spectresmitten, gasping in the sick
dream of a spiritual nightmare and given over to believe a lie. We may
laugh, for the grotesque is blended with the horrible; but we must also
pity and shudder. The clear-sighted men who confronted that delusion in
its own age, disenchanting, with strong good sense and sharp ridicule,
their spell-bound generation,--the German Wierus, the Italian D'Apone,
the English Scot, and the New England Calef,--deserve high honors as the
benefactors of their race. It is true they were branded through life as
infidels and "damnable Sadducees;" but the truth which they uttered
lived after them, and wrought out its appointed work, for it had a Divine
commission and Godspeed.

"The oracles are dumb;
No voice nor hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;
Apollo from his shrine
Can now no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphns leaving."

Dimmer and dimmer, as the generations pass away, this tremendous terror,
this all-pervading espionage of evil, this active incarnation of
motiveless malignity, presents itself to the imagination. The once