shame, and it dies howling in
the darkness. In this world it is scourged with a whip of scorpions, but
afterward the thunders of God's wrath pursue it across a boundless
desert, beating it with ruin and woe. When you come to paint carnality,
do not paint it as looking from behind embroidered curtains, or through
lattice of royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies of a city
hospital. Cursed be the books that try to make impurity decent, and
crime attractive, and hypocrisy noble! Cursed be the books that swarm
with libertines and desperadoes, who make the brain of the young people
whirl with villainy. Ye authors who write them, ye publishers who print
them, ye book-sellers who distribute them, shall be cut to pieces; if
not by an aroused community, then at last by a divine vengeance, which
shall sweep to the lowest pit of perdition all ye murderers of souls. I
tell you, though you may escape in this world, you will be ground at
last under the hoof of eternal calamities, and you will be chained to
the rock, and you will have the vultures of despair clawing at your
soul, and those whom you have destroyed will come around to torment you
and to pour hotter coals of fury upon your head and rejoice eternally in
the outcry of your pain and the howl of your damnation! "God shall wound
the hairy scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses." The clock
strikes midnight, a fair form bends over a romance. The eyes flash fire.
The breath is quick and irregular. Occasionally the color dashes to the
cheek, and then dies out. The hands tremble as though a guardian spirit
were trying to shake the deadly book out of the grasp. Hot tears fall.
She laughs with a shrill voice that drops dead at its own sound. The
sweat on her brow is the spray dashed up from the river of Death. The
clock strikes four, and the rosy dawn soon after begins to look through
the lattice upon the pale form, that looks like a detained specter of
the night. Soon in a mad-house, she will mistake her ringlets for
curling serpents, and thrust her white hand through the bars of the
prison and smite her head, rubbing it back as though to push the scalp
from the skull, shrieking, "My brain! my brain!" O, stand off from that.
Why will you go sounding your way amidst the reefs and warning buoys,
when there is such a vast ocean in which you may voyage, all sail set?

There is one other thing I shall say this morning before I leave you,
whether you want to hear it or not;