Much as we are indebted to our observatories for elevating our conceptions of the heavenly bodies, they present, even to the unaided sight, scenes of glory which words are too feeble to describe. I had occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to Boston, and, for this purpose, rose at two o’clock in the morning. Every thing around was wrapped in darkness, and hushed in silence, broken only by what seemed, at that hour, the unearthly clank and rush of the train. It was a mild, serene, mid-summer’s night; the sky was without a cloud; the winds were hushed. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen; and the stars shown with a spectral lustre but little affected by her presence. Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the day: the Pleiades, just above the horizon, shed their sweet influence in the east: Lyra sparkled near the zenith: Andromeda veiled her newly discovered glories from the naked eye, in the south: the steady Pointers, far beneath the pole, looked meekly up from the depths of the north to their sovereign.
Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded, the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible. The intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels, hidden from mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the heavens; the glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the blue hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the dewy tear-drops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and the Lord of Day, arrayed in glories too severe for gaze of man, began his course.
Examples for Practice
exposition
The Conspiracy to Murder. A conspiracy to kill and murder does not owe its criminality to the length of time it may occupy in its progress, from its first conception to its ultimate adoption—a conspiracy may be formed the very instant before the step is taken to put it into effect. If a number of people meet accidentally in the street, and conspire together to kill and murder at the moment, it is as essentially the crime of conspiracy as if it had been intended for a year before, and hatched from that year to the moment of its accomplishment.
—John P. Curran, Trial of John Costly for conspiracy
to murder, Dublin, Feb. 23, 1804
Circumstantial Evidence of Guilt. I need not pause to remind you how much caution, how much candor, and how much intelligence are requisite in appreciating circumstantial evidence in any case. That kind of evidence may clearly prove guilt. That many times, however, it has also shed innocent blood, and many times it has stained a fair name, I need not pause for a moment to illustrate or remind you. Instead of doing that, I think I shall be better occupied, under the direction of his honor, in reminding you of the two great rules by which circumstantial evidence is to be weighed, appreciated, and applied by the jury. Those rules, gentlemen, are these:
In the first place, that the jury shall be satisfied that they conduct, as a necessary result and conclusion, to the inference of guilt. It is a rule that may be called a golden rule in the examination and application of this kind of evidence which we call circumstantial, that should it so turn out that every fact and circumstance alleged and proved to exist is consistent, on the one hand with the hypothesis of guilt and on the other hand consistent, reasonably and fairly, with the hypothesis of innocence, then those circumstances prove nothing at all. Unless they go so far as to establish as a necessary conclusion this guilt which they are offered with a view to establish, they are utterly worthless and ineffectual for the investigation of truth. I had the honor to read to the court this morning, and possibly in your hearing, an authority in which that familiar and elementary doctrine was laid down, a doctrine every day applied, everywhere recognized as primary in the appreciation of this kind of evidence. It is not enough that the circumstances relied upon are plainly and certainly proved. It is not enough to show that they are consistent with the hypothesis of guilt. They must also render the hypothesis of innocence inadmissible and impossible, unreasonable and absurd, or they have proved nothing at all.
—Rufus Choate, in the Dalton divorce case
Stare Decisis. The people, in forming the organic law of the government of this state, very wisely foresaw that, in its action and progress, questions of interpretation of the settlement of legal principles, and of their application, would frequently arise; and thence the necessity of constituting some tribunal with general appellate and supervisory powers, whose decisions should be final and conclusively settle and declare the law. This was supposed to have been accomplished in the organization of this court. Heretofore this court, under the Constitution, has been looked to by the people as the tribunal of the last resort in the state; and it has hitherto been supposed that when this court has decided a case upon its merits such decision not only determined the right of the parties litigant in that particular case, but that it also settled the principles involved in it as permanent rules of law, universally applicable in all future cases embracing similar facts, and involving the same or analogous principles. These decisions thus became at once public law, measures of private right, and landmarks of property. They determined the right of persons and of things. Parties entered into contracts with each other with reference to them, as to the declared and established law; law equally binding upon the courts and the people. But the doctrine recently put forth would at once overturn this whole body of law founded upon the adjudications of this court, built up as it has been by the long continued and arduous labors, grown venerable with years, and interwoven as it has become with the interests, and habits, and the opinions of the people. Under this new doctrine all would again be unsettled—nothing established. Like the ever returning but never ending labors of the fabled Sisyphus, this court, in disregard to the maxim of “stare decisis,” would, in each recurring case, have to enter upon its examination and decision as if all were new, without any aid from the experience of the past, or the benefit of any established principle or settled law. Each case with decision being thus limited as law to itself alone would in turn pass away and be forgotten, leaving behind it no record of principle established, or light to guide, or rule to govern the future.