It is a melancholy truth that we ourselves manufacture seven eighths of what we are disposed to term our misfortunes in this world. Want of precaution mars our arrangements: want of prudence exposes us to dangers which we might easily have avoided—want of patience often hurries us into difficulties, and disqualifies us to bear them with calmness or decency. Indulgence in follies and fashions often plants the seeds of wasting disease. Intemperance in our passions always is followed by unwelcome sensations, and sometimes with a sense of shame. Stimulants are succeeded by debility, and when they are used to excess, we know and daily witness the dreadful results—if death is not one of them—either the death of the offender, or of some other destroyed by his hand in the tempest of infuriated passions—we are too often compelled to mourn over the desolation they occasion—presenting in one view,
"Hate—grief—despair—the family of pain."
THE RUIN OF A NIGHT.
STANZAS SUGGESTED ON VIEWING THE GROUND OF THE GREAT FIRE IN NEW-YORK.
By Grenville Mellen.
It was still noon—and Sabbath. The pale air
Hung over the great city like a shroud—
And echo answer'd to a footstep there,
Where late went up the thunder of a crowd!
I wander'd like a pilgrim round the piles
That Ruin heap'd about the wildering way—
And as I pass'd, I saw the withering smiles
That did on faces of dull gazers play,
As they stood round the ashes of that grave
Of all that yesterday rose there, so broad and brave!
I mus'd as I went thro' the shadowy path
Of broken, blacken'd walls, and pillars high,
Which had surviv'd that visiting of wrath,
And now lean'd dim against the lurid sky—
I heard the rude laugh break from ruder hearts,
Those ruffian exclamations of lost souls,
At which a better spirit wakes and starts—
The revelry of demons o'er their bowls—
Until I felt how faint rebuke may fall
Over a people, tho' it come in sword and pall!
There was no lesson in that mighty pyre—
Or, if it rose, it faded with the flame;
And crime, relentless, from that smouldering fire
Would lift, at night, its stealthy arm the same
On the lone wanderer, as, amid the crowd,
It glided oft before, to filch its gold,
When the great voice of rivalry was loud,
And onward the deep tide of commerce roll'd!
I thought how idle was the darkest ban,
Fate, in her fiercest eloquence, can pour on man!