st; not for me the sweet name of child, never for
me the languishing look of one whom I love; never, never, the
embracing of a bosom friend! Encircled with murderers; serpents
hissing around me; riveted to vice with iron bonds; leaning on the
bending reed of vice over the gulf of perdition; amid the flowers of
the glad world, a howling Abaddon! Oh, that I might return into my
mother's womb;--that I might be born a beggar! I would never more--O
Heaven, that I could be as one of these day-labourers! Oh, I would
toil till the blood ran down from my temples, to buy myself the
pleasure of one noontide sleep, the blessing of a single tear. There
_was_ a time too, when I could weep--O ye days of peace, thou castle
of my father, ye green lovely valleys!--O all ye Elysian scenes of my
childhood! will ye never come again, never with your balmy sighing
cool my burning bosom? Mourn with me, Nature! They will never come
again, never cool my burning bosom with their balmy sighing. They are
gone! gone! and may not return!"

No less strange is the soliloquy where Moor, with the instrument of
self-destruction in his hands, the 'dread key that is to shut behind
him the prison of life, and to unbolt before him the dwelling of
eternal night,'--meditates on the gloomy enigmas of his future
destiny. Soliloquies on this subject are numerous,--from the time of
Hamlet, of Cato, and downwards. Perhaps the worst of them has more
ingenuity, perhaps the best of them has less awfulness than the
present. St. Dominick himself might shudder at such a question, with
such an answer as this: "What if thou shouldst send me companionless
to some burnt and blasted circle of the universe; which thou hast
banished from thy sight; where the lone darkness and the motionless
desert were my prospects--forever? I would people the silent
wilderness with my fantasies; I should have Eternity for leisure to
examine the perplexed image of the universal woe."

Strength, wild impassioned strength, is the distinguishing quality of
Moor. All his history shows it; and his death is of a piece with the
fierce splendour of his life. Having finished the bloody work of
crime, and magnanimity, and horror, he thinks that, for himself,
suicide would be too easy an exit. He has noticed a poor man toiling
by the wayside, for eleven children; a great reward has been promised
for the head of the Robber; the gold will nourish that poor drudge and
his boys, and Moor goes forth to give i