s heart his mouth singeth:"
"I'm a dandy; I'm a swell.
Just from college, can't you tell?
I'm the beau of every belle;
I'm the swellest of the swell.
I'm the King of all the balls,
I'm a Prince in banquet halls.
My daddy's rich, they know it well,
I'm the swellest of the swell."
NIGHTMARE.
Unhappily for us all, in the world of visions and dreams, there is a
dark side to human life. Here have been dreamed out all the crimes which
have steeped our race in shame since the expulsion from Eden, and all
the wars that have cursed mankind since the birth of history. Alexander
the Great was a monster whose sword drank the blood of a conquered
world. Julius Caesar marched his invincible armies, like juggernauts,
over the necks of fallen nations. Napoleon Bonaparte rose with the
morning of the nineteenth century, and stood, like some frightful comet,
on its troubled horizon. Distraught with the dream of conquest and
empire, he hovered like a god on the verge of battle. Kings and emperors
stood aghast. The sun of Austerlitz was the rising sun of his glory and
power, but it went down, veiled in the dark clouds of Waterloo, and
Napoleon the Great, uncrowned, unthroned, and stunned by the dreadful
shock that annihilated the Grand Army and the Old Guard, "wandered
aimlessly about on the lost field," in the gloom that palled a fallen
empire, as Hugo describes him, "the somnambulist of a vast, shattered
dream."
INFIDELITY.
It is in the desert of evil, where virtue trembles to tread, where hope
falters, and where faith is crucified, that the infidel dreams. To him,
all there is of heaven is bounded by this little span of life; all there
is of pleasure and love is circumscribed by a few fleeting years; all
there is of beauty is mortal; all there is of intelligence and wisdom is
in the human brain; all there is of mystery and infinity is fathomable
by human reason, and all there is of virtue is measured by the relations
of man to man. To him, all must end in the "tongueless silence of the
dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore
and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its
echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air.
He has lost his God, and like some fallen seraph flying in rayless
night, he gropes his way on flagging pinions, searching for light where
darkness reigns, for life where Death is King.
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