Telemachus observed the countenance of these criminals to be pale and
ghastly, strongly expressive of the torment they suffered at the
heart. They looked inward with a self-abhorrence now inseparable from
their existence. Their crimes themselves had become their punishment,
and it was not necessary that greater should be inflicted. They
haunted them like hideous specters, and continually started up before
them in all their enormity. They wished for a second death, that might
separate them from these ministers of vengeance, as the first had
separated their spirits from the body--a death that might at once
extinguish all consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the
depths of hell to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in
impenetrable darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance,
which, though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth,
from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and
unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them,
like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like lightning--a
fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the external parts,
infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth, now an avenging
flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a furnace; it dissolves
all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the first elements of life,
yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as it were, divided against
himself, without rest and without comfort; animated by no vital
principle, but the rage that kindles at his own misconduct, and the
dreadful madness that results from despair.
If the "perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets" that the "Telemachus"
affords is felt at times to be almost cloying, it is not, as our readers
have now seen, for want of occasional contrasts of a bitterness
sufficiently mordant and drastic. But the didactic purpose is never lost
sight of by the author. Here is an aspect of the Elysium found by
Telemachus. How could any thing be more delectably conceived and
described? The translator, Dr. Hawkesworth, is animated to an English
style that befits the sweetness of his original. The "Telemachus:"
In this place resided all the good kings who had wisely governed
mankind from the beginning of time. They were separated from the rest
of the just; for, as wicked princes suffer more dreadful punishment
than other offenders in Tartarus, so good kings enjoy infinitely
greater felicity than other lovers of virtue, in the fields of
Elysium.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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