John Seely Hart

“ He knew that he could have no communion with those whom he had once known: and as he wandered on among the multitude of busy and happy faces, he experienced a feeling of hatred to mankind, mingled with a sense of desolation more withering to his heart than even the dreary and hopeless solitude of his prison cell. ”

“ I have laughed at all religion, and derided the idle terrors of a hell, as the mere bugbear of canting hypocrites. Why, then, did I speak of eternity? We die, are laid in the grave, and are as if we had never been . ”

“ His former visions of greatness could return to him no more; and with the terrible consciousness of his irretrievable fall, his heart became hardened, and his conscience callous to the stings of reproach.
[He was subsequently convicted of a similar crime in another State, and fated to die at last in a prison. A fragment of his history is given, as having been written by himself in his cell, in which he says,] “I know no dates for time. The days, and weeks, and months, are all alike to me. There is but one thought in my bosom continually, from the rising to the setting of the sun ”