It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the
heart, the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed
violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural
process, but should render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent,
and insensibly influence other hearts and other lives to the same
blessed end. I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most
awful truth in Bunyan's book of such, from the very gate of heaven
there is a by-way to the pit!
But, all this while, we have been standing by Zenobia's grave. I
have never since beheld it, but make no question that the grass grew
all the better, on that little parallelogram of pasture land, for the
decay of the beautiful woman who slept beneath. How Nature seems to
love us! And how readily, nevertheless, without a sigh or a
complaint, she converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest
one--that of a conscious intellectual life and sensibility has been
untimely balked! While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and
directed all eyes upon that radiant presence, as her fairest
handiwork. Zenobia perished. Will not Nature shed a tear? Ah, no!--
she adopts the calamity at once into her system, and is just as
well pleased, for aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker
vegetation that grew out of Zenobia's heart, as with all the beauty
which has bequeathed us no earthly representative except in this crop
of weeds. It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless
body is so little valued.
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