famine, hardship, and disease?  Better die at once—­better plunge a poinard in her bosom, still untouched by drear adversity, and then again sheathe it in my own!  But, no; in times of misery we must fight against our destinies, and strive not to be overcome by them.  I would not yield, but to the last gasp resolutely defended my dear ones against sorrow and pain; and if I were vanquished at last, it should not be ingloriously.  I stood in the gap, resisting the enemy—­the impalpable, invisible foe, who had so long besieged us—­as yet he had made no breach:  it must be my care that he should not, secretly undermining, burst up within the very threshold of the temple of love, at whose altar I daily sacrificed.  The hunger of Death was now stung more sharply by the diminution of his food:  or was it that before, the survivors being many, the dead were less eagerly counted?  Now each life was a gem, each human breathing form of far, O! far more worth than subtlest imagery of sculptured stone; and the daily, nay, hourly decrease visible in our numbers, visited the heart with sickening misery.  This summer extinguished our hopes, the vessel of society was wrecked, and the shattered raft, which carried the few survivors over the sea of misery, was riven and tempest tost.  Man existed by twos and threes; man, the individual who might sleep, and wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself weak, yet more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ocean; man, the queller of the elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of demi-gods, existed no longer.

Farewell to the patriotic scene, to the love of liberty and well earned meed of virtuous aspiration!—­farewell to crowded senate, vocal with the councils of the wise, whose laws were keener than the sword blade tempered at Damascus!—­farewell to kingly pomp and warlike pageantry; the crowns are in the dust, and the wearers are in their graves!—­farewell to the desire of rule, and the hope of victory; to high vaulting ambition, to the appetite for praise, and the craving for the suffrage of their fellows!  The nations are no longer!  No senate sits in council for the dead; no scion of a time honoured dynasty pants to rule over the inhabitants of a charnel house; the general’s hand is cold, and the soldier has his untimely grave dug in his native fields, unhonoured, though in youth.  The market-place is empty, the candidate for popular favour finds none whom he can represent.  To chambers of painted state farewell!—­To midnight revelry, and the panting emulation of beauty, to costly dress and birth-day shew, to title and the gilded coronet, farewell!

Farewell to the giant powers of man,—­to knowledge that could pilot the deep-drawing bark through the opposing waters of shoreless ocean,—­to science that directed the silken balloon through the pathless air,—­to the power that could put a barrier to mighty waters, and set in motion wheels, and beams, and vast machinery, that could divide rocks of granite or marble, and make the mountains plain!