Dross

“ Of a wicked heart showing itself in burning lips, furious, passionate, outrageous words, burning in malice, and persecuting those to whom, or of whom, they are spoken; ill words and ill-will agree as well together as a potsherd and the dross of silver, which, now that the pot is broken and the dross separated from the silver, are fit to be thrown together to the dunghill. ”

“ O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell: you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder ”

“ The crown of thorns—the transfixed hands and feet, from which the blood seemed flowing—the wounded side—the sorrowful eyes, appealed to her. "For thee!" whispered the angel conscience; "it was all for thee!—this ignominy—this suffering—this death—oh, erring one! It was all for thee Divine Jesus assumed the anguish and bitterness of the cross! Oh, wanderer! why add new thorns to that awful crown of agony? Why insult the son of God, who suffers for you, by your derelictions and betrayal?" ”

“ Are you not the living image of the latest illusion caressed by our vanity? You, young officer, who still measure your moustaches in the glass, and who have just assumed for the first time the epaulette and the gold belt, how did you feel when you went downstairs and heard the scabbard of your sabre go clink-clank on the steps, when with your cap on one side and your arm akimbo you found yourself in the street, and, an irresistible impulse urging you on, you gazed at your figure reflected in the chemist’s bottles? ”

“ Wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue do thus expell:
2 Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede,
Griefe is a flood, and loue a monster fell;
4 The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede,
The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede:
6 But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay;
The sparks soone quench, the springing seed +outweed+
8 The drops dry vp, and filth wipe cleane away:
So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue dye and decay. ”

“ Help!
"Oh, my God, I'm drowning, I'm drowning. Help! Oh, my God!
"Clyde, Clyde!"
And then the voice at his ear!
"But this—this—is not this that which you have been thinking and wishing for this while—you in your great need? And behold! For despite your fear, your cowardice, this—this—has been done for you. An accident—an accident—an unintentional blow on your part is now saving you the labor of what you sought, and yet did not have the courage to do! ”

“ How often shall the lamp of the wicked be put out, and a deluge come upon them, and He shall distribute the sorrows of His wrath? They shall be as chaff before the face of the wind, and as ashes which the whirlwind scattereth. ”

“ The sense of an unknown horror of sin grew about me, and I became a coward for the moment, — a coward, smitten down by the dread that for me, forever, faith was utterly dead, and so my heart would be imbittered into a vague and fiendish vengeance for its loss. ”

“ For despair is the last and most fatal of sins. But you needn’t give up to it just yet!”
“Oh, what do you mean? What hope have I in this world?”
“The hope that lasts as long as life. Listen, Drusilla. I said that your state was desperate—not that your cause was lost. ‘Desperate cases require desperate remedies.’ Your case is such a one, and my remedy is such a one.”
“What remedy have you for me? However desperate, however dangerous, I will not refuse it or shrink from it! I would dare anything, suffer anything, to save my Alick from his sin and win him back to me again!” ”

“ When in the affliction of my heart I suffer a groan to escape me, I have the appearance of a man who complains without reason, and the authors of my ruin have the inconceivable art of rendering the public, unknown to itself, or without its perceiving the effects of it, accomplice in their conspiracy. ”

“ Even the parrots in the [543] cages warned him off in wrath, when he approached, and entering he saw within the queen afflicted with wrath: with her downcast lotus-like face supported on the palm of her left hand, with tear-drops falling like transparent pearls. And she was repeating, with accents charming on account of her broken speech, in a voice interrupted with sobs, shewing her gleaming teeth, this fragment of a Prákrit song: “If you cannot endure separation, you must cheerfully abandon anger. If you can in your heart endure separation, then you must increase your wrath. ”

“ You know that life hangs on a thread in this frail body, so little fitted to suffer. You feel that life is only a breath, and say to yourself: “Suppose this one is his last.” A little while back he was complaining. Already he does so no longer. It seems as though someone is clasping him, bearing him away, tearing him from your arms. Then you draw near him, and clasp him to you almost involuntarily, as though to give him back some of your own life. His bed is damp with fever sweats, his lips are losing their color. The nostrils of his little nose, grown sharp and dry, rise and fall. ”

“ Nor can we despise opportunities, and not suffer for doing so; if they offer the vase, they also carry the punishment meet for those who neglect its contents. As the boy stood trembling at the gate of Death, a dart came hissing through the air, and inflicted on him a burning wound: then came another and another; every opportunity despised sent its messenger of vengeance, and the wretched boy, writhing with the arrows of conscience in his soul, sank down at the gate, and perished! ”

“ In the abyss of evil into which I am plunged, I feel the blows reach me, without perceiving the hand by which they are directed or the means it employs. Shame and misfortune seem of themselves to fall upon me. ”

“ Or she springs a leak: the water gains upon her; only do nothing, and she will soon sink to the bottom of the sea, and carry with her to destruction her rich freight of souls. So, sinner, is it with you. Do nothing, and your ruin is as certain as it is fearful. Hell gapes for you, and if you turn not, you are lost! ”

“ All hushed as if in dread,
Yet still, and passionless, and calm,
A concourse of the dead!
Across the burning waste they stared
With glazed and stony eye,
As if strange fear had fixed erewhile
Their gaze on vacancy;
And woe and dread on every brow
In changeless lines were wrought,—
Sad traces of the anguish deep
That filled their latest thought!
They seemed a race of other time,
O'er whom the desert's blast,
For many a long and weary age,
In fiery wrath had passed ”

“ Oh, the footfalls! the footfalls! Each tread marks a good or a wicked thought. A fiend or an angel starts beneath every heel. They write an eternal [255] record as they go. Their voices float forever to witness against or for us. We people space as we cleave it. The ground that is dumb as we spurn it has a memory and a revenge. I am more sensitive than my kind; and my penance to these monitors of my sin is but a realization of the terror which all must feel at the accusation of their footfalls. ”

“ All else is confused and blurred—a vague sense of desperate happenings shrouded in fire and smoke, out of which there emerges, now and then, with sharp distinctness, some specially horrible incident, such as the shattering of a comrade into bits. ”

“ The dread and trouble of the times filling all minds, men wished to be forehanded with the decrees of Providence. Into this brooding silence the low, vibrating tones of this mysterious voice entered, and this is what we heard:
“Doom! doom! For him—the one—the betrayer—the passing bell is tolling. Hear it, ye weak ones and grow strong. Hear it, ye mighty and tremble. Not alone for him will it ring. For ye! for ye! if the decree of the linked rings goes forth—-”
Here there was a perceptible quiver of the drapery back of the dais. ”

“ I see how the land lies well enough. I’ve been made a fool of all through!”
“You have not been made a fool of,” I said, with equal energy. “It is cruel of you to say that.”
“Cruel? It comes well from you to say that! I dare say you think it doesn’t matter much; but maybe some day, when I’ve gone to the devil, you’ll be sorry.”
He walked to the door, as if to go.{30}
“I am sorry, Willy,” I said, the tears rushing to my eyes. “Don’t go away like that. Oh, why did I ever come to Durrus?” ”

“ The jester was sobered by his terror, and begged piteously to be liberated. When ready to die with fear, indigestion, and other fatal influences, the frolicsome gentlemen exacted from him a solemn oath, that he would never again cut a joke or make a sarcasm at their expense; and the fool kept his word, if not out of a sense of honour, certainly out of a sense of terror. ”

“ The moment in which fear had instigated my flight, did not seem more terrible than that wherein I put my design in execution appeared delightful. To leave my relations, my resources, while yet a child, in the midst of my apprenticeship, before I had learned enough of my business to obtain a subsistence; to run on inevitable misery and danger: to expose myself in that age of weakness and innocence to all the temptations of vice and despair; to set out in search of errors, misfortunes, snares, slavery, and death ”

“ It remains no longer, but to mock my sense and scoff at my sorrow, to rend my bosom with a woe, complicated, matchless and inexpressible. The cheek is pale and livid; the eyes are sunk and circled with blackness. Corruption and ruin have already seized their prey and turned it into horror. ”

“ They put the branch to their wrath, or to his wrath, as the Masorites read it; that is, they are still bringing more fuel (such as the withered branches of the vine) to the fire of divine wrath, which they have already kindled, as if that wrath did not burn hot enough already. Or putting the branch to the nose may signify the giving of a very great affront and provocation either to God or man; they are an abusive generation of men. 3. He passes sentence upon them that they shall be utterly cut off: Therefore, because they are thus furiously bent upon sin, I will also deal in fury with them, v. ”

“ Tuesday, 21 January, 1895, 9 o’clock in the morning.
How you must suffer!... The tragedy of which we are the victims is certainly the most terrible of the century. To have everything—happiness, the future, a charming home—and then, all at once, to be accused and condemned for a crime so monstrous!
Ah, the monster who has cast dishonor in our family might better have killed me; at least there would then have been only me to suffer! This is what tortures me the most; it is the thought of the infamy that is coupled with my name. If I had only physical sufferings to bear, it would be nothing. ”

“ Exhaustion and dejection were pictured in their faces, desperation, wrath, something indescribable, the look of one who dies cursing, of a man who is weary of life, who hates himself, who blasphemes against God. The strongest lowered their heads to rub their faces against the dusky backs of those in front of them and thus wipe away the sweat that was blinding them. ”

“ Every devil frighted into active life: the whole house in an uproar. Up runs Will.—Sir—Sir—Sir!—Eyes goggling, mouth distended—Bid the damn’d toad Dorcas come hither, (as I stood at the stair-head,) in a horrible rage, and out of breath, cried I.
In sight came the trembling devil—but standing aloof, from the report made her by Will. of the passion I was in, as well as from what she had heard.
Flash came out my sword immediately; for I had it ready on—Cursed, confounded, villanous bribery and corruption——
Up runs she to her lady’s door, screaming out for safety and protection. ”

“ The dark river, a rushing car over an embankment to swift oblivion, a living agony of remorse,—the rewards it will be noted bear a distinct resemblance each to the other. For the wages of sin have long been classified, tabulated and fixed, a minimum of mercy, a maximum of disaster. All else is heresy. ”

“ It was as if this sight had been some unseen torch and had set to flaming the smoldering hates and feuds, the smothered hatreds of years; and now, without a word being spoken, without the outward suavity of the scene being changed, this fire crackled round through the assembly as fire might catch a light festooning of drapery. ”

“ She has little notion of converting criminals. There is no faculty of mercy in her when she has been resisted. Her word is only, "I will mock when your fear cometh." Note the words that follow: "when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction as a whirlwind;" for her wrath is of irresistible tempest: once roused, it is blind and deaf,—rabies—madness of anger— darkness of the Dies Iræ. ”

“ Thus the dogma of the fall is not simply the expression of a special and transitory state of human reason and morality: it is the spontaneous confession, in symbolic phrase, of this fact as astonishing as it is indestructible, the culpability, the inclination to evil, of our race. Curse upon me a sinner! cries on every hand and in every tongue the conscience of the human race. ”

“ Not that I blame you altogether for all that terrible trouble you got into and bringing so much suffering and disgrace on yourself and us—for well I know how the devil tempts and pursues all of us mortals and particularly just such a child as you. ”

“ The Return of the Druses, on the other hand, treats of human nature in its most romantic conditions, of the mystic East, of great and immediate issues, of the most inspiring of crises, a revolt for liberty, and a revolt under the leadership of a "Messiah," about whom hangs a mystery, and a reputation of more than mortal power. ”

“ But the Scriptures tell us that the mysterious person, who thus stands before all worlds as the image and impersonation of divine tenderness, has yet in reserve this awful energy of wrath. The oppressors, in the last dread day, are represented as calling to the mountains and rocks to fall on them, and hide them from the wrath of the Lamb. ”