Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/188

176 adds, the Lord afflicted her, because of the multitude of her transgressions; for Jerusalem had greatly sinned. How, in the day of her miseries, the Jew remembers her pleasant things that she had in the days of old; how her children have swooned from their wounds in the streets of their city, and have poured out their soul into their mother's bosom; Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is forsaken, because their tongue and their doings were against the Lord, to provoke the eyes of his glory! It is well that mother and Marius should mourn their loss; that Napoleon and the Hebrew should remember each his own defeat. Poets say, that, on the vigil of a fight, the old soldier's wounds smart afresh, bleeding anew. The poets fancy should be a nation's fact.

But sometimes a man commits a wrong. He is false to himself, and stains the integrity of his soul. He comes to consciousness thereof, and the shame of the consequence is embittered by remorse for the cause. Thus Peter weeps at his own denial, and Judas hangs himself at the recollection of his treachery; so David bows his penitent forehead and lies prostrate in the dust. The anniversary of doing wrong is writ with fire on the dark tablets of memory. How a murderer convicted, yet spared in jail,—or, not convicted, still at large,—must remember the day when he first reddened his hand at his brother's heart! As the remorseless year brings back the day, the hour, the moment, and the memory of the deed, what recollections of ghastly visages come back to him! I once knew a New England man who had dealt in slaves; I now know several such ; but this man stole his brothers in Guinea to sell in America. He was a hard, cruel man, and had grown rich by the crime. But, hard and cruel as he was, at the mention of the slave-trade, the poor wretch felt a torture at his iron heart which it was piteous to behold. His soul wrought within him like the tossings of the tropic sea about his ship, deep fraught with human wretchedness. He illustrated the torments of that other "middle passage," not often named.

Benedict Arnold, successful in his treason, safe,—only Andre hanged, not he, the guilty man,—pensioned, feasted, rich, yet hated by all ingenuous souls not great enough to pity, hateful to himself; how this great public shame of