Life in the Clearings versus the BushMoodie, Susanna
History
Life in the Clearings versus the Bush
Moodie, Susanna
Frontier and pioneer life -- Ontario; Moodie, Susannah, 1803-1885; Ontario -- Description and travel
What a sublime truth! How beautifully and forcibly expressed! With what
a mournful dignity it invests our fallen nature! Sin has marred the
Divine image in which we were made, but the soul in its intense longing
after God and good bears, in its sorrowful servitude to evil, the
impress of the hand that formed it happy and free. Yes, even in the most
abject and fallen, some slight trace of good remains--some spark of the
Divine essence that still lingers amid the darkness and corruption of
guilt, to rekindle the dying embers, and restore them once more to life
and liberty. The madman raving in his chains still remembers his God, to
bless or blaspheme his name. We are astonished at his ecstatic dream of
happiness, or shocked beyond measure at the blackness of his despair.
His superhuman strength fills us with wonder; and, even in the
extinction of reason, we acknowledge the eternal presence of God, and
perceive flashes of his Spirit breaking through the dark material cloud
that shades, but cannot wholly annihilate the light of the soul, the
immortality within.
The poor, senseless idiot, who appears to moral eyes a mere living
machine, a body without a soul, sitting among the grass, and playing
with the flowers and pebbles in the vacancy of his mind, is still a
wonderful illustration of the wisdom and power of God. We behold a human
being inferior in instinct and intelligence of the meanest orders
of animal life, dependent upon the common charities of his kind for
subsistence, yet conscious of the friend who pities his helplessness,
and of the hand that administers to his wants. The Spirit of his Maker
shall yet breathe upon the dull chaos of his stagnant brain, and open
the eyes of this blind of soul into the light of his own eternal day!
What a lesson to the pride of man--to the vain dwellers in houses of
clay!
Returning from the asylum, we stopped to examine Trinity College, which
is on the opposite side of the road. The architect, K. Tully, Esq., has
shown considerable taste and genius in the design of this edifice,
which, like the asylum, is built of white brick, the corners, doors, and
windows faced with cut stone. It stands back from the road in a fine
park-like lawn, surrounded by stately trees of nature's own planting.
When the college is completed, it will be one of the finest public
buildings in the province, and form one of the noblest ornaments to this
part of the city.
The Maniac.
"The wind at my casement scream'd shrilly and loud,
And the pale moon look'd in from her mantle of cloud;
Old ocean was tossing in terrible might,
And the black rolling billows were crested with light.
Like a shadowy dream on my senses that hour,
Stole the beautiful vision of grandeur and power;
And the sorrows of life that brought tears to mine eye,
Were forgot in the glories of ocean and sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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