CONTRASTS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 175, 4 August 1876, Page 12

CONTRASTS.

*-t In times of great distress — of grief that follows the death of some one very dear to us, or of anxiety, that precedes or dreads this — it often seems as if nature were mocking us. There is a sick room on which all our energies are concentrated; or a face, whose expression has formed our earthly light, is regardless of our presence as we look upon it, upturned and fixed in the last long sleep ; and, all the time, the sun is shining, gardens and meadows teem with flowers, birds are singing merrily, and insects fill the air with their cheery humming. But these things, which at other seasons would be to us a source of delight, now seem out of place and in the way. The mind appears to look for scenery appropriate to the feelings with which it views some all engrossing action or suffering that engages it. And as circumstances at variance with those in which we are bound up make these harder to bear, so do discrepant events or surroundings add darkness to transactions which we regard from a distance. A murder committed with open violence and disturbance, horrible though it be, has not the same power to impress us that a like deed done in cold blood has. In the stillness of the night, while all the family are sleeping, a girl rises from her bed, and noiselessly withdrawing her brother, a little child, from his nurse's side, creeps away and kills him. A young man comes to visit a lady to -whom he had been affianced for a time; it is summer, and he meets her in a garden ; they turn down a walk together, and in a few moments she is found bleeding profusely from a mortal wound that he has given her with a knife. Dreadful deeds to contemplate would these be in any case, but is not the horror of them increased by the manner of their performance ? And, if we go further, passing from private crimes, committed in our own day, to certain that are doubtful recounted in poetry, or seme that are certain told in history, we still find discordant circumstances increase our revulsion. The weirdest scene in Homer's Iliad is that where, having Jearned from the spy Dolon the circumstances of the Thracian encampment, TJlysses and Diomede stealthily enter there in the night, and the latter cuts the throats of the king and twelve of his followers as they lie, overpowered by fatigue, asleep upon the ground — "an evil dream," indeed, to them, and leaving to us a night-mare-producing fame. The murder of Marie Antoinette was one of the most foul ever committed. Everything conspired to make her a fitting object for love and reverence. She was venerable by her birth and her descent from a historic house ; f>he was intellectual, gentle, and benevolent ; a pious Christian, a faithful wife, a devoted mother. Her beauty was surpassing, and it was of a most touching kind; in her pictures, in the great galleries of Versailles, she looks as pure and innocent as the little children accompanied by whom she is painted. And yet her death, since it occurred in a tune of general bloodshed and confusion, is less horrible to contemplate, comparatively recent though it be, than that of Mary, Queen of Scots, in

the hall of Fotheiingay Castle ; and this, because the latter was inflicted in the midst of quietness and order. The hall was duly prepared; a platform, was erected there, as it might now be elsewhere for some festive occasion; the block was placed upon it, and it was covered with black cloth ; the headsmen stood with their axes close at hand. There camo the queen, composed and, despite her long years of suffering, still eminently beautiful, and there was the Dean of Peterborough bent to the last on perverting the victim to his views. The attendants of the captive were also present, and a group of spectators standing a short distance off at the bottom of the hall. The deed of blood was systematically wrought, but all | the more are we filled with horror, when the executioner holds up the severed head by its hair, turned grey with sorrow, while he utters his impious prayer, to which is returned the more impious response of the heretical ecclesiastic standing near. A critic speaks of Shakspeare's consummate art in causing Lady Macbeth and her lord to be interrupted immediately after the assassination of Duncan, thus bringing upon them the full realisation of their grim deed. Such a sense must have been awakened in the minds of those whohad been present in the hall of Fotheringay as they passed out across the castle's threshold into the open air, where, perhaps, the birds were singing, for it was early spring, and hopeful nature gave no token of the awful spectacle that had just been witnessed within.

It seems to us that we can almost discern, in this tendency of men to look for appropriate settings for any picture of distress, an additional reason for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, and for the thorns and thistles which the earth was sentenced thenceforth to produce, for thus the fallen found themselves in scenes assimilated to their condition, and were not liable to be grieved by beholding a state of things at variancejwith their altered lot. Vadius.