That to be hated, needs but to be seen.”
Like the genie of Arabic fable, it has risen up, where it was least expected, and stalked through the most secret and the most public apartments. And wherever it has appeared, it has prostrated the human mind. It has silenced the voice of eloquence in the halls of justice and legislation. It has absorbed the brain of the scientific lecturer. It has caused the sword to drop from the hand of the military leader. It has stupefied the author in his study, and the pastor in his desk. It has made the wife a widow in her youth, and caused the innocent child to weep upon a father's grave. We dare not look beyond it. Hope, who has attended the victim of intemperance through all the changes of his downward fortune, and not forsaken him in any other exigency, has forsaken here. Earth had its vanities to solace him, but eternity has none.
“Wounds of the heart—care, disappointment, loss,
Love, joy, and friendship's fame, and fortune's cross,
The wound that mars the flesh—the instant pain
That racks the palsied limb, or fever'd brain,
All—all the woes that life can feel or miss,
All have their hopes, cures, palliatives, but this—
This only—mortal canker of the mind,
Grim Belial's last attempt on human kind.”