bent before towards the
highest objects of human ambition, were now forced to converge to one
point, the guarding against the innumerous arrows of the plague.

At any other time this disaster would have excited extreme compassion among
us; but it was now passed over, while each mind was engaged by the coming
controversy. It was not so with me; and the question of rank and right
dwindled to insignificance in my eyes, when I pictured the scene of
suffering Athens. I heard of the death of only sons; of wives and husbands
most devoted; of the rending of ties twisted with the heart's fibres, of
friend losing friend, and young mothers mourning for their first born; and
these moving incidents were grouped and painted in my mind by the knowledge
of the persons, by my esteem and affection for the sufferers. It was the
admirers, friends, fellow soldiers of Raymond, families that had welcomed
Perdita to Greece, and lamented with her the loss of her lord, that were
swept away, and went to dwell with them in the undistinguishing tomb.

The plague at Athens had been preceded and caused by the contagion from the
East; and the scene of havoc and death continued to be acted there, on a
scale of fearful magnitude. A hope that the visitation of the present year
would prove the last, kept up the spirits of the merchants connected with
these countries; but the inhabitants were driven to despair, or to a
resignation which, arising from fanaticism, assumed the same dark hue.
America had also received the taint; and, were it yellow fever or plague,
the epidemic was gifted with a virulence before unfelt. The devastation was
not confined to the towns, but spread throughout the country; the hunter
died in the woods, the peasant in the corn-fields, and the fisher on his
native waters.

A strange story was brought to us from the East, to which little credit
would have been given, had not the fact been attested by a multitude of
witnesses, in various parts of the world. On the twenty-first of June, it
was said that an hour before noon, a black sun arose: an orb, the size of
that luminary, but dark, defined, whose beams were shadows, ascended from
the west; in about an hour it had reached the meridian, and eclipsed the
bright parent of day. Night fell upon every country, night, sudden,
rayless, entire. The stars came out, shedding their ineffectual glimmerings
on the light-widowed earth. But soon the dim orb passed from over the sun,
and lingered d