A Picture of Intemperance.
By C. B.
PORTRAY the evils of intemperance if you can! He does not live who can tell the whole story of its woes. Exaggeration here is impossible. The fatigued fancy falters in its flight before it comes up to the fact. The mind's eye cannot take in the countless miseries of its motley train. No art can put into that picture shades darker than the truth. Put into such a picture every conceivable thing that is terrible or revolting; paint health in ruins, hope destroyed, affections crushed, prayer silenced; paint the chosen seats of parental cares, of filial piety, of brotherly love, of maternal devotion—all, all vacant; paint all the crimes of every stature and of every hue, from murder standing aghast over a grave which it has no means to cover, down to the mean deception, still confident of success; paint home a desert, and shame a tyrant, and poverty the legitimate child of vice in the community, and not its prolific mother; paint the dark valley of the shadow of death peopled with living slaves; paint a landscape with trees whose fruit is poison and whose shade is death, with mountain torrents tributary to an ocean whose very waves are fire; put in the most distant background the vanishing vision of a blessed past, and in the foreground the terrible certainty of an accursed future; paint prisons with doors that open inward; people the scene with men whose shattered forms are tenanted with tormented souls, with children upon whose lips no smile can ever play, and with women into whose cheeks furrows have been burnt by tears wrung by anguish from breaking hearts; paint such a picture, and when you are ready to show it, do not let in the rays of the heavenly sun, but illumine it with glares from the infernal fires, and still you will be bound to say that your terrible picture falls short of the truth!—C. B., in Golden Censer.