272 CONSCIENCE.-THE MURDER IN SALEM. Salem, his relatives, especially to two young men named Knapp, his near relations, and who, with others, expected to come into large property after the death of Mr. White. Daniel Webster, the great orator and statesman, was not in the habit of practising in criminal cases; and the counsel engaged for the defence of the Knapps dealt severely with him for consenting to take the exceptional position, which he did at the call of the Government, although, as he said, "Hardly more than once or twice has it happened to me to be concerned in any criminal prosecution whatever, and never, until the present case, in any affecting life." In fact, the clearing up of the case satisfactorily was a difficult task, and demanded the exercise of a mind of the highest order. The moral evidence was clear, the circumstantial was most luminous; but to reach to absolute demonstration was still not so easy. The argument of Webster may be described as wonderful. It is spoken of as wonderful in Salem to this day. The writer of these words stood before the fine, ancient mansion, in the company of an old resident of the city, and heard him recall the astonishment which was felt while Webster seemed, with sustained, calm, and clear vision, to put together every minute action of every moment, not only during the terrible night, but before and after, in the history of the crime, till the whole circumstances came out in one clear lurid light. His speech for the prosecution is very long, and abounds with some of the most solemn and religious of his utterances. The movements of conscience in a criminal bosom have never been anywhere more fearfully portrayed; and these remarks were founded upon the fact that the wretched criminal had tended to incriminate himself by his restlessness in inquiring what people had thought about the murder and the author of it, when certainly no one had ever thought of him. He sat with the body, in the room in which he had done the deed, the night after the murder, and he was one of the chief mourners who followed the murdered man to his grave. The following passages from Webster's great oration have often been referred to, and the very striking contrast pointed out from the peaceful rest of the old man and the perturbation of the murderer : "Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. The assassin enters, through the window already prepared, into an unoccupied apartment. With noiseless foot he paces the lonely hall, half lighted by the moon; he winds up the ascent of the stairs, and reaches the door of the chamber. Of this he moves the lock by soft and continued pressure, till it turns on its hinges without noise, and he enters and beholds his victim before him. The room is uncommonly open to the admission of light. The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the grey locks of his aged temple, show him where to strike. The fatal blow is given; and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of THE ORATION OF DANIEL WEBSTER. 273 sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work, and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard! To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse! He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is accomplished. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to the window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. escapes. He has done the murder. No eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and he is safe! "Ah! gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake. Such a secret can be safe nowhere. The whole creation of God has neither nook nor corner where the guilty can bestow it, and say it is safe. Not to speak of that eye which pierces through all disguises, and beholds everything as in the splendour of noon, such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection, even by men. True it is, generally speaking, that 'murder will out.' True it is, that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so govern things, that those who break the great law of Heaven by shedding man's blood, seldom succeed in avoiding discovery. Especially in a case exciting so much attention as this, discovery must come, and will come, sooner or later. A thousand eyes turn at once to explore every man, every thing, every circumstance, connected with the time and place; a thousand ears catch every whisper, a thousand excited minds intensely dwell on the scene, shedding all their light, and ready to kindle the slightest circumstance into a blaze of discovery. Meantime, the guilty soul cannot keep its own secret. It is false to itself; or rather, it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself. It labours under its guilty possession, and knows not what to do with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such an inhabitant. It finds itself preyed on by a torment which it dares not acknowledge to God or man. A vulture is devouring it, and it can ask no sympathy or assistance, either from heaven or earth. The secret which the murderer possesses soon comes to possess him, and, like the evil spirits of which we read, it overcomes him, and leads him whithersoever it will; he feels it beating at his heart, rising to his throat, and demanding disclosure; he thinks the whole world sees it in his face, reads it in his eyes, and almost hears its workings in the very silence of his thoughts; it has become his master, it betrays his discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his prudence; when suspicions from without begin to embarrass him, and the net of circumstance to entangle him, the fatal secret struggles with still greater violence to burst forth; it must be confessed, it will be confessed; there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession." The closing words, on duty fulfilled or unfulfilled, are also very fine :"There is no evil that we cannot either face or fly from, but the consciousness of duty disregarded; a sense of duty pursues us ever, it is T 274 CONSCIENCE DISCLOSES THE MURDERER. omnipresent like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are still with us, we cannot escape their power, nor fly from their presence; they are with us in this life, will be with us at its close, and in that scene of inconceivable solemnity which lies yet further onward, we shall yet find ourselves surrounded by the consciousness of duty, to pain us whenever it has been violated, and to console us so far as God may have given us grace to perform it." We have quoted thus at length from this great argument, because the advocate rises into a solemnity of strain and dignified eloquence far above that of the ordinary practitioner at the Bar. We may say further, that none of the little but terrible details in the description of the murder scene were merely imaginative; they were all the dovetailing together of the items of real knowledge, elicited from the corresponding evidences of the servants, the surgeons, the aspect of the house, and the time of night. The reference to suicide as the recoil of the soul in its despair, has its point also in the fact that one guilty and implicated in the crime had just committed suicide in his cell. The two Knapps who were upon their trial were convicted and executed. DUM VIVIMUS VIVAMUS. AMONG the mottoes of English families, few are better known than this, "Dum vivimus vivamus "-freely translated, "While you live, live!"—chiefly because of the happy paraphrase of Dr. Doddridge, who inherited it with his family crest : "Live, while you live," the Epicure would say, I live in pleasure when I live to Thee." Most of our readers will remember that Dr. Johnson spoke of this as one of the very finest epigrams in our language. It is, however, a converted epigram; it is not probable that when the original motto was first expressed it was intended to convey the sense which Doddridge gave to it; it is like one of the jewels of Egypt adorning an Israelite on his way through the wilderness. The classics and the classical languages are full of words to whose concise elegance a Christian sentiment has given an additional charm, not transforming, but, in a noble sense, expanding. The sentiment of the motto is, without doubt, as Doddridge has said, Epicurean; it is, says an amiable writer in commenting upon it, "a dubious and worldly-sounding motto;" and he further remarks, "It is difficult to get a quite holy Christian sentiment into the motto, by reason of the 'while you live,' which mars its adaptableness more seriously than at once appears. It shuts out eternity so jealously, and makes death into a gloom and a finish so obstinately; and the 'while' is so wholly alien from infinity of anything whatever, that Dr. Doddridge did but, after all, make a very brilliant best of a bad business." This is the very pedantry of criticism. Still, it seems that the intention of the motto might originally have been that old Epicurean philosophy of the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake as the end of life; live to enjoy-"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die;" hence the skull, or skeleton, at the ancient feast was not there to impair, but to promote hilarity and enjoyment. But, as the great St. Basil said, "The study of truth in the classical and Gentile writers, is like gazing on the sun in water in order that we may be able to look up to the true light;" and Gregory the 276 THE SONG OF THE EPICUREAN. Great says, "We are instructed by them in such secular wisdom that our minds may be more capable of receiving that which is divine." Basil says, again, "As in culling a rose we avoid the thorns, so, in such discourses, let us enjoy the good, and be on our guard against that which is hurtful." In this spirit Doddridge appears to have paraphrased his family motto; he threw over it a spell and a charm until, as with the varied languages of the day of Pentecost, its words were "filled with the Holy Ghost, and it spake with another tongue as the Spirit gave it utterance." Thus, when drawn forth from Epicurean sensuality, what a glorious motto it is, "Live, while you live." The original sense of the motto would no doubt be satisfied by such a sentiment as we find in a free translation from the Greek anthology : "Oh, this is life, and nought but this, to live in every pleasure; Dull care begone! nor mortals rob of life's uncertain treasure; New wine is ours, the dance is ours, with wreaths around us gleaming Some persons are blessed with a rich redundancy of life-a vigorous life, so rejoicing and full, that it imparts its overflow to all others who come into its neighbourhood; and yet few persons have taste enough to manage a truly exuberant life gracefully and usefully. Others, again, have so little of this joy in life that they become morbid themselves; and they frame, or adopt, morbid creeds, and they are disposed to charge impiety and irreligion on all who manifest a buoyancy of soul; all their praises are requiems or elegies, and their highest recreation is in something approaching as nearly as possible to a funeral sermon with Pope's Ode at the end, by way of afterpiece. Goethe says, " He is already dead who only lives to keep himself alive;" and how different a spirit is revealed in a couplet from the same writer : "The gods need many a noble man to do Their work on earth;-they count on me and you." But, as an unknown writer wisely remarks, "This vivacity of life does not necessarily imply longevity, just as a man may exist to a hundred without it. It only enables a person to live while he lives, and to enjoy life while he has it. 'With the exception of three mortal diseases,' writes Sydney Smith, 'I am quite well.' Life in him would not flag or give in. Madame de Staël shocks our sense of decorum by giving dinner-parties on her death-bed. When we find Schiller pronouncing her, of all living creatures he ever met, the most vivacious, we understand it better. Death is an idea so alien to persons of this temperament that, though the reason assents to it as a fact, it cannot overshadow their minds. The victims of bile, indigestion, and all such lowering, depressing influences, may live to old age in spite of them; but they must still be afflicted by fears and imaginations suggestive of decay and extinction, |