Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical passion, surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he must seem to the angels a madman--a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for the circles of hell have this property--that they have no end. It seems as though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown power. But no; for if so, evil would be the true God, and hell would swallow up creation. According to the Persian and the Christian faiths, good is to conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored to grace--which is as much as to say that the divine order will be everywhere re-established. Love will be more potent than hatred; God will save his glory, and his glory is in his goodness. But it is very true that all gratuitous wickedness troubles the soul, because it seems to make the great lines of the moral order tremble within us by the sudden withdrawal of the curtain which hides from us the action of those dark corrosive forces which have ranged themselves in battle against the divine plan. June 26, 1865.--One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical _resumé_ of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the soul, the running over of the cup of reverie. All that one cannot or will not say, all that one refuses to confess even to one’s self--confused desires, secret trouble, suppressed grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the emotions we have struggled against, the pain we have sought to hide, our superstitious fears, our vague sufferings, our restless presentiments, our unrealized dreams, the wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatisfied languor, the vain hopes, the multitude of small indiscernible ills which accumulate slowly in a corner of the heart like water dropping noiselessly from the roof of a cavern--all these mysterious movements of the inner life end in an instant of emotion, and the emotion concentrates itself in a tear just visible on the edge of the eyelid.