HELL.
The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.—Psalm ix. 17.
I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell.—Luke, xii. 5.
God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.—II. Peter, ii. 4.
Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
But in my heart her several torments dwell.
Shakspere.
Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire
Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.
Milton.
Which way shall I fly,
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
Milton.
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; but where we are is hell;
And where hell is, there must we ever be;
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.
Marlowe.
Will without power, the element of hell,
Abortive all its acts returning still
Upon itself; ... oh! anguish terrible!
Meet guerdon of self-love, its proper ill!
Malice would scowl upon the foe he fears;
And he with lip of scorn would seek to kill;
But neither sees the other, neither hears—
For darkness each in his own dungeon bars,
Lust pines for dearth, and grief drinks its own tears—
Each in its solitude apart. Hate wars
Against himself, and feeds upon his chain,
Whose iron penetrates the soul it scars,
A dreadful solitude each mind insane,
Each its own place, its prison all alone,
And finds no sympathy to soften pain.
J. A. Heraud.
I’ll tell thee what is hell—thy memory
Still mountained up with records of the past,
Heap over heap, all accents and all forms,
Telling the tale of joy and innocence,
And hope, and peace, and love; recording, too,
With stern fidelity, the thousand wrongs
Worked upon weakness and defencelessness;
The blest occasions trifled o’er or spurned;
All that hath been that ought not to have been,
That might have been so different, that now
Cannot but be irrevocably past!
Thy gangrened heart,
Stripped of its self-worn mask, and spread at last
Bare, in its horrible anatomy,
Before thine own excruciated gaze!
D. P. Starkey.
The day
Will come, when virtue from the cloud shall burst,
That long obscured her beams; when sin shall fly
Back to her native hell; there sink eclipsed
In penal darkness, where nor star shall rise,
Nor ever sunshine pierce the impervious gloom.
Glynn.
In the human breast there dwell
Warring passions fierce and dark,
Making of their home a hell,
Of the soul a driving bark
On a wild tempestuous sea,
Till too oft ’tis wrecked and driven
Far away, far away!
Hear the pitying angels say—
Soul so lost, and tempest-tost,
Upon hell and death’s bleak coast,
Far away from heaven!
Egone.