f the ills of life, we
never sufficiently take into consideration the wonderful elasticity of
our moral frame, the unlooked for, the startling facility with which
the human mind accommodates itself to all change of circumstance,
making an object and even a joy from the hardest and seemingly the
least redeemed conditions of fate. The man who watched the spider in
his cell, may have taken, at least, as much interest in the watch, as
when engaged in the most ardent and ambitious objects of his
former life; and he was but a type of his brethren; all in similar
circumstances would have found similar occupation.

_Eternal Punishment._--So wonderful in equalizing all states and all
times in the varying tide of life, are the two rulers yet levellers of
mankind, Hope and Custom, that the very idea of an eternal punishment
includes that of an utter alteration of the whole mechanism of the
soul in its human state, and no effort of an imagination, assisted by
past experience, can conceive a state of torture, which custom can
_never_ blunt, and from which the chainless and immaterial spirit can
_never_ be beguiled into even a momentary escape.

_Prison Solitude._--I have been now so condemned to feed upon myself,
that I have become surfeited with the diet.--_Aram_.

_Sensibility._--We may triumph over all weaknesses but that of the
affections.

_Silence of Cities._--The stillness of a city is far more impressive
than that of Nature; for the mind instantly compares the present
silence with the wonted uproar.

_Suspense._--Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject,
suspense is the one that most gnaws, and cankers into the frame. One
little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told,
in a very remarkable work lately published by an eye-witness,[7]
is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of
five-and-twenty--sufficient to dash the brown hair with grey, and to
bleach the grey to white.

[7] Wakefield on "The Punishment of Death."

_Consolation._--Her high and starry nature could comprehend those
sublime inspirations of comfort, which lift us from the lowest abyss
of this world to the contemplation of all that the yearning visions of
mankind have painted in another.

It is a fearful thing to see _men_ weep.

We are seldom sadder without being also wiser men.

What is more appalling than to find the signs of gaiety accompanying
the reality of anguish.

_Consolation._--If we