He rested his head
upon his hands in deep but momentary agony. What were his feelings then?
With warm, pure emotions; with a pride only limited by a true sense of
propriety; with an ambition whose eye was sunward ever; with affections
which rendered life doubly desirable, and which made love a high and
holy aspiration: with these several and predominating feelings
struggling in his soul, to be told of such a doom; to be stricken from
the respect of his fellows; to forfeit life, and love, and reputation;
to undergo the punishment of the malefactor, and to live in memory only
as a felon--ungrateful, foolish, fiendish--a creature of dishonest
passions, and mad and merciless in their exercise!
The tide of thought which bore to his consciousness all these harrowing
convictions, was sudden as the wing of the lightning, and nearly
shattered, in that single instant, the towering manhood whose high
reachings had attracted it. But the pride consequent to his education,
and the society in which he had lived, came to his relief; and, after
the first dreadful agony of soul, he again stood erect, and listened,
seemingly unmoved, to the defences set up by his counsel.
Pages:
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708