Again, abstain from those books which are apologetic of crime. It is a sad thing that some of the best and most beautiful bookbindery, and some of the finest rhetoric, have been brought to make sin attractive. Vice is a horrible thing, anyhow. It is born in shame, and it dies howling in the darkness. In this world it is scourged with a whip of scorpions, but afterward the thunders of God's wrath pursue it across a boundless desert, beating it with ruin and woe. When you come to paint carnality, do not paint it as looking from behind embroidered curtains, or through lattice of royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies of a city hospital. Cursed be the books that try to make impurity decent, and crime attractive, and hypocrisy noble! Cursed be the books that swarm with libertines and desperadoes, who make the brain of the young people whirl with villainy. Ye authors who write them, ye publishers who print them, ye book-sellers who distribute them, shall be cut to pieces; if not by an aroused community, then at last by a divine vengeance, which shall sweep to the lowest pit of perdition all ye murderers of souls. I tell you, though you may escape in this world, you will be ground at last under the hoof of eternal calamities, and you will be chained to the rock, and you will have the vultures of despair clawing at your soul, and those whom you have destroyed will come around to torment you and to pour hotter coals of fury upon your head and rejoice eternally in the outcry of your pain and the howl of your damnation! "God shall wound the hairy scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses." The clock strikes midnight, a fair form bends over a romance. The eyes flash fire. The breath is quick and irregular. Occasionally the color dashes to the cheek, and then dies out. The hands tremble as though a guardian spirit were trying to shake the deadly book out of the grasp. Hot tears fall. She laughs with a shrill voice that drops dead at its own sound. The sweat on her brow is the spray dashed up from the river of Death. The clock strikes four, and the rosy dawn soon after begins to look through the lattice upon the pale form, that looks like a detained specter of the night. Soon in a mad-house, she will mistake her ringlets for curling serpents, and thrust her white hand through the bars of the prison and smite her head, rubbing it back as though to push the scalp from the skull, shrieking, "My brain! my brain!" O, stand off from that. Why will you go sounding your way amidst the reefs and warning buoys, when there is such a vast ocean in which you may voyage, all sail set?