An able lawyer would turn this to a triumphant account; and it would be admirable as a means of pre-engaging the good opinion as well as the sympathies of the public in behalf of the prisoner. But, for its final effect--my conviction remained, not to be shaken, that all would be useless; that our doom had gone forth, and was irrevocable. Let me not linger too much over those sad times. Morning came on as usual; for it is strange, but true, that to the very wretched it seems wonderful that times and seasons should keep their appointed courses in the midst of such mighty overthrows, and such interruption to the courses of their own wonted happiness and their habitual expectations. Why should morning and night, why should all movements in the natural world be so regular, whilst in the moral world all is so irregular and anomalous? Yet the sun and the moon rise and set as usual upon the mightiest revolutions of empire and of worldly fortune that this planet ever beholds; and it is sometimes even a comfort to know that this will be the case. A great criminal, sentenced to an agonizing punishment, has derived a fortitude and a consolation from recollecting that the day would run its inevitable course--that a day after all was _but_ a day--that the mighty wheel of alternate light and darkness must and would revolve--and that the evening star would rise as usual, and shine with its untroubled lustre upon the dust and ashes of what _had_ indeed suffered, and so recently, the most bitter pangs, but would then have ceased to suffer. 'La Journée,' said Damien, 'La journée sera dure, mais elle se passera.' '----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my day also, my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will have an end; that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so long as I thought at all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching, when thinking in any shape would for some time be at an end for me.