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Confessions of a Murderer.

which were once black, glared with a light in which all colour was lost, and seemed to fill the whole dungeon with their flashings. I saw his guilt-I saw what was more terrible than his guilt his insanity-not in emaciation onlynot in that more than death-like whiteness of his face-but in all that stood before me the figure, round which was gathered the agonies of so many long days and nights of remorse and phrenzy and of a despair that had no fears of this world or its terrors, but that was plunged in the abyss of eternity.

For a while the figure said nothing. He then waved his arm, that made his irons clank, motioning me to sit down on the iron frame-work of his bed; and when I did so, the murderer took his place by my side.

A lamp burned on a table before us. -and on that table there had been drawn by the maniac-for I must indeed so call him-a decapitated human body-the neck as if streaming with gore-and the face writhed into horrible convulsions, but bearing a resemblance not to be mistaken to that of him who had traced the horrid picture. He saw that my eyes rested on this fearful mockery-and, with a recklessness fighting with despair, he burst out into a broken peal of laughter, and said, "to-morrow will you see that picture drawn in blood!"

He then grasped me violently by the arm, and told me to listen to his confession, and then to say what I thought of God and his eternal Providence.

"I have been assailed by idiots, fools, and drivellers, who could understand nothing of me nor of my crime,-men who came not here that I might confess before God, but reveal myself to them, and I drove the tamperers with misery and guilt out of a cell sacred to insanity. But my hands have played in infancy, long before I was a murderer, with thy gray hairs, and now, even that I am a murderer, I can still touch them with love and with reverence. Therefore my lips, shut to all besides, shall be opened unto thee,

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"I murdered her. Who else loved her so well as to shed her innocent blood? It was I that enjoyed her beauty-a beauty surpassing that of the daughters of men,-it was I that filled her soul with bliss, and with trouble,-it was I alone that was privileged to take her life. I brought her into sin-I kept her in sin-and when she would have left her sin, it was fitting that I, to whom her heart, her body, and her soul belonged, should suffer no divorcement of them from my bosom, as long as there was blood in her's,-and when I saw that the poor infatuated wretch was resolved-I slew her;-yes, with this blessed hand I stabbed her to the heart.

"Do you think there was no pleasure in murdering her? I grasped her by that radiant, that golden hair,

I bared those snow-white breasts,— I dragged her sweet body towards me, and, as God is my witness, I stabbed, and stabbed her with this very dagger, teu, twenty, forty times, through and through her heart. She never so much as gave one shriek, for she was dead in a moment, but she would not have shrieked had she endured pang after pang, for she saw my face of wrath turned upon her, she knew that my wrath was just, and that I did right to murder her who would have forsaken her lover in his insanity.

"I laid her down upon a bank of flowers,-that were soon stained with her blood. I saw the dim blue eyes beneath the half-closed lids,-that face so changeful in its living beauty was now fixed as ice, and the balmy breath came from her sweet lips no more. My joy, my happiness, was perfect. I took her into my arms-madly as I did on that night when first I robbed her of what fools called her innocencebut her innocence has gone with her to heaven-and there I lay with her bleeding breasts prest to my heart, and many were the thousand kisses that I gave those breasts, cold and bloody as they were, which I had many million times kissed in all the warmth of their loving loveliness, and which none were ever to kiss again but the husband who had murdered her.

VOL. 4.]

Confessions of a Murderer.

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"I looked up to the sky. There sand times, even when she lay in reshone the moon and all her stars. signed love in my bosom, something Tranquillity, order, harmony, and whispered to me, Murder her!' It peace, glittered throughout the whole may have been the voice of Satan-it universe of God. Look up, Maria, may have been the voice of God. For your favourite star has arisen.' I who can tell the voice of heaven from gazed upon her, and death had begun that of hell? Look on this bloodto change her into something that was crusted dagger-look on the hand that most terrible. Her features were hard- drove it to her heart, and then dare to ened and sharp,-her body stiff as a judge of me and of my crimes, or lump of frozen clay,-her fingers rigid comprehend God and all his terrible and clenched, and the blood that was decrees! once so beautiful in her thin blue veins was now hideously coagulated all over her corpse. I gazed on her one moment longer, and, all at once, I recollected that we were a family of madmen. Did not my father perish by his own hand? Blood had before been shed in our house. Did not that warrior ancestor of ours die raving in chains? Were not those eyes of mine always unlike those of other men? Wilder at times fiercer—and oh! father, saw you never there a melancholy, too woful for mortal man, a look sent up from the darkness of a soul that God never visited in his mercy?

"I knelt down beside my dead wife. But I knelt not down to pray. No: I cried unto God, if God there be

Thou madest me a madman! Thou madest me a murderer! Thou foredoomedst me to sin and to hell! Thou, thou, the gracious God whom we mortals worship. There is the sacrifice! I have done thy will,-I have slain the most blissful of all thy creatures; -am I a holy and commissioned priest, or am I an accursed and infidel murderer ?'

"Father, you start at such words! You are not familiar with a madman's thoughts. Did I make this blood to boil so? Did I form this brain? Did I put that poison into my veins which flowed a hundred years since in the heart of that lunatic, my heroic ancestor? Had I not my being imposed, forced upon me, with all its red-rolling sea of dreams; and will you, a right holy and pious man, curse me because my soul was carried away by them as a ship is driven through the raging darkness of a storm? A thou

"Look not away from me. Was I not once confined in a madhouse? Are these the first chains I ever wore? No. I remember things of old, that others may think I have forgotten. Dreams will disappear for a long, long time, but they will return again. It may have been some one like me that I once saw sitting chained, in his black melancholy, in a madhouse. I may have been only a stranger passing through that wild world. I know not. The sound of chains brings with it a crowd of thoughts, that come rushing upon me from a dark and far-off world. But if it indeed be true, that in my boyhood I was not as other happy boys, and that even then the clouds of God's wrath hung around me,-that God may not suffer my soul everlastingly to perish.

"I started up. I covered the dead body with bloody leaves, and tufts of grass, and flowers. I washed my hands from blood-I went to bed-I sleptyes, I slept for there is no hell like the hell of sleep, and into that hell God delivered me. I did not give myself up to judgment. I wished to walk about with the secret curse of the murder in my soul. What could men do to me so cruel as to let me live? How could God curse me more in black and fiery hell than on this green and flowery earth? And what right had such men as those dull heavy-eyed burghers to sit in judgment upon me, in whose face they were afraid to look for a moment, lest one gleam of it should frighten them into idiocy? What right have they, who are not as I am to load me with their chains, or to let their villain executioner spill my blood?

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Clerical Duty to Malefactors.

If I deserve punishment-it must rise up in a blacker cloud under the hand of God in my soul.

"I will not kneel-a madman has no need of sacraments. I do not wish the forgiveness nor the mercy of God. All that I wish is the forgiveness of her I slew; and well I know that death cannot so change the heart that once had life, as to obliterate from THINE the merciful love of me! Spirits may in heaven have beautiful bosoms no more; but thou, who art a

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spirit, wilt save him from eternal perdition, whom thou now knowest God created subject to a terrible disease. If there be mercy in heaven, it must be with thee. Thy path thither lay through blood: so will mine, Father! thinkst thou that we shall meet in heaven. Lay us at least in one grave on earth."

In a moment he was dead at my feet. The stroke of the dagger was like lightning, and—

CLERICAL DUTY TO MALEFACTORS. From the Monthly Magazine.

To the Editor-Sir,

THE

HE deeds of horror and of villany which have been perpetrated in this country from the murders of the Marrs and Williamsons, attest a depravity never known before; and, when at length worldly justice overtakes the criminals, we behold them dying with all the paraphernalia of religious penitence, faith, and hope, yet without confession of the condemning sin. Surely the mind of every one who believes in the all-wise, all-just God of truth, must be filled with horror at the scene of hypocrisy and delusion which takes place; while the law loses its terrors, and sin beguiles its fears; and wickedness, with greater hope, spreads further and wider. The gospel gives us one instance of dying repentance, hence there is hope; and but one, hence there is fear. How different was that one from any of these:-" We receive the due reward of our deeds," said the dying malefactor before all the people; and with his penitence, even at that late hour, proving his faith,-"Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom;" while his Lord was dying on the cross; but among these we have all the outward acts of holiness, long prayers, and verbal professions of ge. neral sin, penitence, &c.; but the only act that can prove truth is omitted, or in some cases delayed, till the sufferer himself is beyond the effect of it. Thus, Channel, just condemned for murdering

his father, is told to make his peace with God, and the unconfessing parricide declares, that he has already made his peace with God; thus Hussey, declaring himself innocent, is most exemplarily penitent, and writes fine letters, worthy of publication; yet, just at the last, by the perseverance of the priest, owns the actual sin. Are mere words to make our peace with God? Does he want us to confess to him? Does the priest only wish to have his own curiosity gratified? Is there any meaning in a private confession to God and the priest, and from which confession mankind is to reap no benefit? The security is false, the comfort is vain, without sincerity. "If ye love not your brother whom ye have seen, how can ye love God whom ye have not seen?" Is this the religion of truth? Is this Christianity? where the convict professes his innocence, makes his peace with God (as he and others call it,) by continual and fervent prayer; and now, when worldly hope of a reprieve, or of a mitigation of his sentence, is past, acknowledges the sin? Were not all his acts of penitence performed with hypocrisy at his heart, and can these acts avail him before the God of truth? Surely all his acts of penitence were falsehoods, were additional sins,-they were but a cloak to the robber and the murderer. "I suffer the penalty of the law; why should I involve others?

VOL. 4.]

Recluse of the Pyrenees, a new poem.

Why should I injure the reputation of my family, my relations, and my friends? I will be true to my companions-I will not make myself the object of popular indignation." Assuredly, there is no need of any public confession and remorse, if the things of this world have the first place in the heart; but there is every need,if there be a hope of another world. "He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me," says the God of truth. There can be no faith in Christ, and hence no hope in Christ, unless the penitent labours, as well as he is able, to prove his truth. It is the first thing that the penitent is to do, to confess as publicly as his confession is likely to be of service in convicting sin in himself, or in others, in shewing the debasing nature of sin in his own person, in making reparation to the injured laws of his country, and in bringing truth to light before all men, though he himself may not see all the good consequences of the same. Confession precedes absolution. Where the sin has been general, let the confession be so too; but, where the sin has been particular and public, so must the confession be. The public and particular confessions of a Rousseau were most contemptible, but from a Hussey they were imperiously demanded, as that justice towards man which might be

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acceptable to God. With what propriety can the public minister attend on the convict who will not confess that for which he is convicted? This should be the priest's language--" Innocent or guilty, truth can alone, through Christ, make your prayers of any avail; your case becomes more and more grievous and dangerous, by every appearance of religion, as long as you deny the truth. If I advise you, or pray with you, or administer the sacrament to you, I am the unwilling means of evil,not of good till your heart be sincere and true. There is not a robber, an adulterer, or a murderer, now rioting in full sin, and success, and ease, whose case is not more favourable than your own now is, with all your penitence, and sorrow, and preparation for death, as long as you persevere in falsehood and deceit." Most earnestly would I caution all attending priests-their office is not to call the righteous, but the sinner to repentance; and repentance can only be proved by the utmost sincerity, the most earnest endeavours to undo every evil, and a constant eagerness and anxiety to recompence, to serve, to oblige, and to be obedient, in all the different ways in which they may promote any good on the part of the offender. C. LUCAS. Devizes; Sept. 4, 1818.

THE RECLUSE OF THE PYRENEES....A POEM.
From the Literary Panorama.

THIS poem is evidently an imita

tion of Lord Byron's style and manner. The fable is briefly as follows: Mansel, a British Officer, who had been left desperately wounded on the field of battle, on the Pyrenees, is in danger of being devoured by the wolves that followed the contending armies; but just as one of them is in the act of springing on him, the beast is killed by a shot from an invisible hand. Mansel's deliverer is the Recluse, Count Alba, who conducts him to his castle, and tends his wounds with the utmost

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had glanced upon him as he entered the castle; unable to control his feelings, While the fresh cool air of midnight breath'd

around, Mansel

-left the couch where he no rest had found, With restless feet the corridor to pace.

Here his attention is arrested by some exquisitely sweet but melancholy notes; and, observing a distant figure, which he pursues in hope of meeting with the object of his passion, he follows these strains through various winding passages, until he meets with a youthful beauty' kneeling before an altar

With arms upon her bosom meekly cross'd.
While Mansel stood, bewilder'd

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and amaz'd,' Count Alba suddenly addresses him; and informs him that he beholds the mockery of life,'-the marble figure of the Count's departed wife, with whom he had fled from a convent. Although she escaped the toils laid for her by her pursuers, the terrors of excommunication, which had been thundered against her preyed upon her mind, and she died prematurely, after giving birth to a lovely child. Here the poem abruptly terminates; and the anonymous author informs us, in a note, that, "should any further curiosity exist as to the ultimate fate of these personages, (Mansel and the Count's daughter,) the reader may perhaps have some future opportunity of satisfying it."

There is so much true poetry, and delicate feeling in this production, closely as it treads in Lord Byron's steps, that we cannot but wish the author may be induced to publish a second part, and finish the tale he has so ably commenced. We transcribe two or three stanzas, descriptive of Mansel's danger and deliverance.

Helpless he lies, upon his bloody lair,

No comrades' watchful eye to guard him there;
Their hearts are cold, their gallant spirits flown;
And, if indeed he breathes-he breathes alone-
"Tis hard so say, if those pale lips still hold
The beaming monarch, of his earthly mould;
Or have those gaping wounds a passage given,
For the unfetter'd soul to soar to Heaven?
Ah no! the labouring breast that deeply swells,
Shows that the vital flame within it dwells-
Struggling and slow, he draws the gasping breath
That seems to wrestle with the arm of Death!
And, as returning strength warms each dull vein,
The muscles quiver with awaking pain-
And features too that stunn'd in torpor lay,
Now shrink with anguish-and convulsive play,
Yet still he sleeps-as if a spell had bound
His form in leaden slumber to the ground!
Yet still he sleeps !-if sleep indeed it be
To feel-yet know not, wounds and agony:

The midnight air was clearly cold and keen,
And as young Mansel gaz'd on that dread scene,
He felt it probe his rankling wounds again→→
Nor found he that proud apathy to pain,
Which nerves the valiant in th' combat's heat,
When danger charms, and death itself is sweet.
He stood like lonely wretch, escap'd a wreck,
Whose grateful joy the fears of famine check ;
Who almost wishes that the roaring wave
Had giv'n at once a momentary grave.
His feeble frame began to sink and faint,
While cheating memory would fondly paint

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Those kindred spirits, now how doubly dear,
When hope seem'd lost,and death was hov'ring near ;
No faithful friend to read the dying eye
That beams affection, when the tongue is dry.

While lost in that dark loneliness of mind,

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moaning sound arose, like mountain wind
When first it murmurs in the gloomy hold,
Where cavern'd deep it lies, benumb'd with cold-
Again it sounds! a fear awaking yell !
As spirits of the waste, or spectres fell,
The deep voic'd echoes to the cries reply,
From rock to rock in piercing shriek they fly.
At length a rav'ning troop of wolves are seen,

Shaggy and gaunt, with eyes of fiery gleam,
Rioting, on their luscious feast they break,

And in the purple gore their hot thirst slake;
With foaming jaws the mangled corse they rip,
And from the white firm bone the soft flesh strip;
There, o'er a youthful form that mocks at life,
Gorging, and growling, urge they wrangling strife;
Disjointed, torn-are left without a trace-

Those manly limbs, where shone a matchless grace,

Like some fair temple, which the thunder-flame

Has scatter'd wide in ruin o'er the plain.
And kiss'd the cherub-lips of each dear child,
And felt a proud exulting joy to see
Each blooming blossom reach maturity...
Their honour'd heads with wisdom's hoary down?
And fondly hop'd that well spent years would crown
Was it for this.that beauty's eyes have beam'd,
Delighted with the future scenes they dream'd;
On each lov'd breast in silent rapture hung,

Was it for this...their mothers o'er them smiled,

And blush'd to hear the music of each tongue ?
Now fill'd and glutted, slow they mumbling feast,
The victors of the field...in thought at least;
While some a banquet view, with longing eyes,
Where the warm luxury of life still lies;
With hankering jaws around, sullen they howl,
Claiming the victim with a snarling growl.
He stood defenceless-yet the cowards wait!
Resign'd he stood, to meet the blow of Fate;
And yet they pause !--but not in mercy there,
Their greedy teeth they gnash, their red eyes glare,
Ready to spring, thronging they crouch around;
And yet they pause-as if in magic bound!
'Twas Mansel's firm, and bold, unfaltering glance
That fixt them motionless, in harmless trance;
It was that mighty magic of the mind,
That for a moment can the tiger bind,
The monarch bid of Afric's burning sand
Turn baulk'd away, or check'd and daunted stand.
A moment cow'd they stood....then with a bound,
And roaring yell that made the rocks resound,
A shaggy monster sprung...but sprung in vain,
The whistling death-shot crash'd his giddy brain!
Dash'd to the earth, the daring felon lies,
And wreathing in the dust...convulsive dies!

Some instances of careless rhymes occur in this elegant poem, which the author will doubtless correct in a future edition, and avoid in any continuation which he may hereafter publish.

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