Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes tells us how the members of the medical profession feel when the "poison-chalice" of their prescriptions is commended to their own lips; in other words, when the visitor becomes the visitee:
"Just change the time, the person, and the place
And be yourself the 'interesting case;'
You'll gain some knowledge which it's well to learn;
In future practice it may serve your turn.
Leeches, for instance—pleasing creatures quite;
Try them, and, bless you! don't you think they bite?
You raise a blister for the smallest cause,
And be yourself the great sublime it draws;
And, trust my statement, you will not deny
The worst of draughtsmen is your Spanish Fly.
It's mighty easy ordering when you please,
'Infusi Sennæ, capiat uncias tres';
It's mighty different when you quackle down
Your own three ounces of the liquid brown.
'Pilula Pulvis'—pleasant words enough,
When other jaws receive the shocking stuff;
But oh! what flattery can disguise the groan,
That meets the gulp which sends it through your own!"
"Ah! they are very busy and bustling here now, but they will all be still enough by-and-by," said a clergyman from the country, as he passed with his friend, for the first time, through Cortlandt-street into crowded Broadway, at its most peopled hour. "And," said our informant (the friend alluded to, who had lived in the Great Metropolis all his life), "I never before felt so forcibly, so sudden was the observation, and so fervent the expression of the speaker, the truth of his remark. To me, the scene before us was an every-day one; to him, spending his days in the calm retirement of the country, the crowd, the roaring of the wheels, the sumptuous vehicles of Wealth, and the bedizened trappings of Pride, presented a contrast so strong, that the exclamation which he made was forced from him by the overpowering thought: "Ye busy, hurrying throng, ye rich men, ye vain and proud men, where will all these things be, where will you be seventy years from now?" "After all," says Sydney Smith, "take some thoughtful moment of life, and add together two ideas of pride and of man: behold him, creature of a span high, stalking through infinite space, in all the grandeur of littleness. Perched on a speck of the universe, every wind of heaven
strikes into his blood the coldness of death; his soul floats from his body like melody from the string. Day and night, as dust on the wheel, he is rolled along the heavens, through a labyrinth of worlds, and all the creations of God are flaming above and beneath. Is this a creature to make himself a crown of glory? to mock at his fellows, sprung from the dust to which they must alike return? Does the proud man not err? does he not suffer? does he not die? When he reasons, is he never stopped by difficulties? When he acts, is he never tempted by pleasures? When he lives, is he free from pain? when he dies can he escape the common grave? Pride is not the heritage of man. Humility should dwell with Frailty, and atone for ignorance, error, and imperfection."
That sort of curiosity which invests murderers and their secret motives with so much interest, instances of which may be seen any week almost in our very midst, was finely satirized many years ago by a writer in one of the English or Scottish periodicals. The criminal was arrested for the murder of an old woman, who had no money to tempt his avarice, and he resisted all inquiries touching the motives which induced him to commit the horrid deed. He "couldn't tell," he said; "it was a sudden impulse—a sort of a whisper; Satan put it into his head." He had no reason for doing it; didn't know why he did it. Ladies brought tracts and cakes to his prison, and begged him to "make a clean breast of it." Why did he do it? "Lord knows," said he, "I don't." At his trial the jury brought him in guilty, but recommended him to mercy, provided he gave his reasons. He said he "hadn't any; he killed the old 'oman off-hand; it was a sudden start—the same as a frisk: he couldn't account for it; it was done in a dream, like." Finally the day appointed for his execution arrived; and the sheriff, under-sheriffs, clergy, reporters, etc., all implored him to make a full confession, now that his time had come. A phrenologist, knowing that although "Murder had no tongue, it could speak with most miraculous organ," felt the devoted head, but was none the wiser. The interest in the murderer was now increased tenfold; and such was the demand for locks of the culprit's hair, that when he was led forth to the scaffold, there remained upon his head but a few carroty clippings; "and all this while," says the writer in parenthesis, "there was poor old Honesty toiling for a shilling a day, wet or shine, and not one Christian man or woman to ask him for so much as one white hair of his head!" Well, the murderer, unyielding to the end, stands at last upon the scaffold, the focus of the gaze of ten thousand sons and daughters of curiosity, in the street, at the windows, on the house-tops. The hangman is adjusting the rope; the clergyman is reading the death-service; the fatal bolt is about to be withdrawn; when a desperate individual, in a straw-hat, a light blue jacket, striped trowsers, and Hessian boots, with an umbrella under his arm, dashes in before the clergyman, and in hurried accents puts the old question, "Why did you do it?" "Why, then," said the convict, with an impatient motion of his cropped head, "I did it—to get my hair cut!" And he had not miscalculated the sympathy with crime which was to denude his guilty head for "keep sakes!"
Those who have risen early on a Sabbath morning in the country, and experienced the solemn stillness and holy calm of the hour, will read the following
lines with something of the religious fervor with which they came warm from the heart of the author: