George Croly

“ Look from this very threshold; are there not thousands within the walls of Jerusalem, groaning in the pangs of unhealed wounds, mad, starving, stripped of every succor of man, dying in hovels, the last survivors of their wretched race? and yet we, still enjoying health, with a roof over our heads, with our children round us safe, when the plague of the first-born has fallen upon almost every house in Judea, can complain! Be comforted, my love; I see but one actual calamity among us; and if Constantius should survive, even that one would be at an end. ”

“ Constantius was, with ineffectual gallantry, assaulting the fortress; my brave kinsmen were sacrificing their lives under the Roman spears, and I was not there!
A fitful sound came mingling with the roar of the cataract; it swelled, and vanished like the rushings of the gale. A trumpet sounded, but so feebly that nothing but the keenness of an ear straining to catch the slightest sound could have distinguished it. I heard remote shouts; they deepened; the echo of trumpets followed.
“The assault has begun!” I thought. “The work of glory and of death was doing. Every instant cost a life. ”

“ There is silent the voice that for fifty years spoke more than the thoughts of man in the ears of a guilty people. There are cold the hands that struck the harp of more than mortal sounds to the glory of Him to whom earth and its kingdoms are but as the dust of the balance. There lies the heart which neither the desert, nor the dungeon, nor the teeth of the lion, nor the saw of Manasseh, could tame—the denouncer of our crimes—the scourge of our apostasy—the prophet of that desolation which was to bow the grandeur of Judah to the grave as the tree of the mountain in the whirlwind. ”

“ In the Italian republics of after ages, I saw the vigor that, living in the native soil of empire, has always sprung up on the first call. The time has changed since Italy poured its legions over the world. The volcano was now sleeping; yet the fire still burned within its womb, and threw out in its invisible strength the luxuriant qualities of the land of power. The innate Roman passion for sovereignty was no longer to find its triumphs in the field; it rushed up the paths of a loftier and more solid glory, with a speed and a strength that left mankind wondering below. ”

“ It was this perpetual anxiety that broke the spirits of the troops. All was in hostility to them. They felt that there was not a secure spot within the horizon. Every man whom they saw, they knew to be one who either had drawn Roman blood or who longed in his inmost soul to draw it. They dared not pass by a single rock without a search for a lurking enemy. Even a felled tree might conceal some daring savage, who was content to die on the Roman spears, after having flung his unerring lance among the ranks or shot an arrow that went through the thickest corslet. ”

“ The love which nature and justice won from me to my family was perpetually thwarted by a chain of circumstances that made me a wretched, helpless, and solitary man. What then could I do better than abandon the idle hope of finding happiness among mankind; break off the trial, which must be prolonged only to my evil; and elude the fate that destined me to be an exile in the world? Yes, I would no longer be a man of suffering, in the presence of its happiness; a wretch stripped of an actual purpose, or a solid hope, in the midst of its activity and triumph ”

“ Hating the tyranny of the Roman, as I live this hour, I would rather see the city of David inhabited by none but the idolater, or delivered over to the curse of Babylon and made the couch of the lion and the serpent, than see its courts filled with those impious traitors to the spirit of the law, those cruel extortioners under the mask of self-denial, those malignant revelers in human torture under the name of insulted religion, whose joy is crime, and every hour of whose being but wearies the long-suffering of God and precipitates the ruin of my country. ”

“ The Roman Reenforcement
With what eyes of impatience I now watched the sun. As the hour of fate approached, the fever of the mind grew. To defer the attack beyond the night was to abandon it, for by morn the troops under Florus must reach Masada. Yet a strange sensation, a chilliness of heart sometimes came on me, in which my hands were as feeble as an infant’s. Nothing tries the soul more deeply than this concentration of its fortunes into a few moments. The man sees himself standing on the edge of a precipice, down which there is no second step. ”

“ But their worship was terror—they believed and trembled.
“Power,” said the possessed, and his large and unmoving eyes seemed lighting up with fire from within; “power you shall have, and hate it; wealth you shall have, and hate it; life you shall have, and hate it; yet you shall know the heights and depths of man. You shall be the worm among a nation of worms; you shall be steeped in ruin to the lips; you shall undergo the bitterness of death, until——” His brow writhed; he gnashed his teeth, and convulsively sprang from the ground, as if an arrow had shot through him. ”

“ It was pursued, but by no semblance of the Roman.
An awful enemy was on its steps. Flashes of forked fire, like myriads of lances, darted after it; cloud on cloud deepened down, as the smoke of a mighty furnace; globes of light shot blasting and burning along its track. Then amid the double roar of thunder rushed forth the chivalry of heaven. Shapes of transcendent beauty, yet with looks of wrath that withered the human eye—armed sons of immortality descending on the wing by millions—mingled with shapes and instruments of ruin, for which the mind has no conception. ”

“ What beauty can we demand from the dungeon? What dignity of aspect from the hewers of wood and drawers of water for mankind? Where shall we seek the magnificent form and illumined countenance of the hero and the sage—from the heart cankered by the chain, from the plundered, the enslaved, the persecuted of two thousand years?
Of the daughters of my country I have never seen the equals in beauty. Our blood was Arab, softened down by various changes of state and climate, till it was finally brought to perfection in the most genial air and the most generous soil of the globe. ”

“ Imagination was to be my tyrant; and every occurrence of life, every aspect of humanity, every variety of nature, day and night, sunshine and storm, made a portion of its fearful empire. What is insanity but a more vivid and terrible dream? It has the dream-like tumult of events, the rapidity of transit, the quick invention, the utter disregard of place and time. The difference lies in its intensity. The madman is awake; and the open eye administers a horrid reality to the fantastic vision. The vigor of the senses gives a living and resistless strength to the vagueness of the fancy ”

“ How often, like that of a spirit descended to minister consolation to the wanderer, have I seen, in my midnight watching, thy countenance of more than woman’s beauty! To me thou hast never died. Thy more than man’s loftiness of soul; thy generous fidelity of love to a wayward and unhappy heart; thy patient treading with me along the path that I had sowed with the thorn and thistle for thy feet, but which should have been covered with the wealth of princes, to be worthy of thy loveliness and thy virtue—all rise in memory, and condemnation, before the chief of sinners. ”

“ A destruction shall come to which the past was the sport of children. Tower and wall, citadel and temple, shall be dust. The sword shall do its work—the chain shall do its work—the flame shall do its work. Bad spirits shall rejoice; good spirits shall weep; Israel shall be clothed in sackcloth and ashes for a time, impenetrable by a created eye. The world shall exult, trample, scorn, and slay. Blindness, madness, and misery shall be the portion of the people. ”

“ Freedom! twin sister of Virtue, thou brightest of all the spirits that descended in the train of Religion from the throne of God; thou that leadest up man again to the early glories of his being; angel, from the circle of whose presence happiness spreads like the sunrise over the darkness of the land; at the waving of whose scepter, knowledge and peace and fortitude and wisdom descend upon the wing; at the voice of whose trumpet the more than grave is broken and slavery gives up her dead,—when shall I see thy coming? ”

“ The wo of millions, the blood of a nation, the ruin of the glorious Law, built by the hands of the Eternal, for the glory and good of mankind, are written in words of flame before our eyes; and can I complain of the perils which may fall to my share? Henceforth, my husband and my love”—and she threw herself into my willing arms—“you shall never be disturbed with my sorrows; exercise your own powerful understanding, guard against evil by your talents and knowledge of life, as far as it can be guarded against by man, and beyond that, cease to repine or fear. ”

“ Still the immortal armies poured on, trampling and blasting, until the last of the routed were consumed.
The angry pomp then paused. Countless wings were spread, and the angelic multitudes, having done the work of vengeance, rushed upward, with the sound of ocean in the storm. The roar of trumpets and thunders was heard, until the splendor was lost in the heights of the empyrean.
We felt the terrible warning. Our strength was dried up at the sight; despair seized upon our souls. We had seen the fate of Jerusalem. No victory over man could now save us from the coming of final ruin! ”

“ With his impassiveness, his experience, his knowledge, and his passions, concocted and blackened by ages, what breast could be safe against the dagger of this tremendous exile? What power be secure against the rebel machination or the open hostility of a being invested with the strength of immortal evil? What was to hinder a man made familiar with every mode of influencing human passions—the sage, the sorcerer, the fount of tradition, the friend of their worshiped ancestors—from maddening the multitude at whose head he willed to march, clothed in the attributes of almost a divinity? ”

“ I have seen men, once ignorant of all languages but their own, speaking with the language of every nation under heaven; the still greater wonder of the timid defying all fear, the unlearned instantly made wise in the mysteries of things divine and human, the peasant putting to shame the learned—awing the proud, enlightening the darkened; alike in the courts of kings, before the furious people, and in the dungeon, armed with an irrepressible spirit of knowledge, reason, and truth that confounded their adversaries. ”

“ We passed along through all the horrid varieties of misery, guilt, and riot that could find their place in a great public calamity; groups gazing in wo on the wreck of their fortunes in vapor and fire; groups plundering in the midst of the flame; crowds of rioters, escaped felons, and murderers, exulting in the public ruin, and dancing and drinking with Bacchanalian uproar; gangs of robbers stabbing the fugitives, to strip them; revenge, avarice, despair, profligacy, let loose naked; undisguised demons, to swell the wretchedness of this tremendous infliction upon a blood-covered empire. ”

“ I now saw more of the captain, and was witness to the extraordinary activity and skill of this singular young man. Never was there a more expert seaman. For every change of sea or wind he had a new expedient; and when the hearts of the stoutest sank, he took the helm into his hands and carried us through the chaos of foam, whirlwind, and lightning with the vigor of one born to sport with the storm.
As I was gazing over the vessel’s side at the phosphoric gleams that danced along the billows, he came up to me. ”

“ The horizon grew dim; the cloudy canopy above continued to spread and revolve; lightning began to quiver through, and we heard, at intervals, low peals of thunder. But no rain fell, and the wind was lifeless. Nothing could be more complete than the calm; not a hair of our heads was moved, yet the heart of the countless multitude was penetrated with the dread of some impending catastrophe that restrained every voice, and the silence itself was awful.
In the climate of Judea we were accustomed to the rapid rise and violent devastations of tempests. ”