Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub

XCIX. SPEECH ON THE TRIAL OF A MURDERER.

AGAINST the prisoner at the bar, as an individual, I can not have the slightest prejudice. I would not do him the smallest injury or injustice. But I do not affect to be indifferent to the discovery and the punishment of this deep guilt. I cheerfully share in the opprobrium, how much soever it may be, which is cast on those who feel and manifest an anxious concern that all who had a part in planning, or a hand in executing this deed of midnight assassination, may be brought to answer for their enormous crime at the bar of public justice.

This is a most extraordinary case. In some respects it has hardly a precedent anywhere; certainly none in our New England history. This bloody drama exhibited no suddenly excited, ungovernable rage. The actors in it were not surprised by any lionlike temptation springing upon their virtue, and overcoming it before resistance could begin. Nor did they do the deed to glut savage vengeance, or satiate long-settled and deadly hate. It was a cool, calculating, money-making murder. It was all "hire and salary, not revenge." It was the weighing of money against life, the counting out of so many pieces of silver against so many ounces of blood.

An aged man, without an enemy in the world, in his own house, and in his own bed, is made the victim of a butcherly murder for mere pay. Truly, here is a new lesson for painters and poets. Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited in an example, where such example was last to have been looked for, in the very bosom of our New England society, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate, and the bloodshot eye emitting livid fires of malice. Let him draw, rather, a decorous, smooth

faced, bloodless demon; a picture in repose, rather than in action; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity, and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal nature, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character.

The deed was executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned. The circumstances, now clearly in evidence, spread out the whole scene before us. 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 was uncommonly open to the admission of light. The face of the innocent sleeper was turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, showed him where to strike. The fatal blow is given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death!

It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he yet plies the dagger, though it was obvious that life had 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. He has done the murder;

no eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and it 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 glances through all disguises, and beholds everything as in the splendor 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, everything, 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 can not keep its own secret. It is false to itself, or rather it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself. It labors 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 nor 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.
down his courage, it conquers his prudence.
picions 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 con-
fessed, it will be confessed; there is no refuge from con-
fession but suicide, and suicide is confession.

It betrays his discretion, it breaks
When sus-

-Daniel Webster.

NOTE.-The above extract is from Daniel Webster's argument in the trial of John F. Knapp for the murder of Mr. White, a very wealthy and respectable citizen of Salem, Mass. Four persons were arrested as being concerned in the conspiracy; one confessed the plot and all the details of the crime, implicating the others, but he afterwards refused to testify in court. The man who, by this confession, was the actual murderer, committed suicide, and Mr. Webster's assistance was obtained in prosecuting the others. John F. Knapp was convicted as principal, and the other two as accessaries in the murder.

C. THE CLOSING YEAR.

George Denison Prentice, 1802-1870, widely known as a political writer, a poet, and a wit, was born in Preston, Connecticut, and graduated at Brown University in 1823. He studied law, but never practiced his profession. He edited a paper in Hartford for two years; and, in 1831, he became editor of the "Louisville Journal," which position he held for nearly forty years. As an editor, Mr. Prentice was an able, and sometimes bitter, political partisan, abounding in wit and satire; as a poet, he not only wrote gracefully himself, but he did much by his kindness and sympathy to develop the poetical talents of others. Some who have since taken high rank, first became known to the world through the columns of the " Louisville Journal."

'TIS midnight's holy hour, and silence now

Is brooding like a gentle spirit o'er

The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds,
The bell's deep notes are swelling; 't is the knell
Of the departed year.

No funeral train

Is sweeping past; yet, on the stream and wood,
With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest
Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred
As by a mourner's sigh; and, on yon cloud,
That floats so still and placidly through heaven,
The spirits of the Seasons seem to stand-

Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form,
And Winter, with his aged locks-and breathe

In mournful cadences, that come abroad

Like the far wind harp's wild and touching wail,
A melancholy dirge o'er the dead year,

Gone from the earth forever.

'Tis a time

For memory and for tears. Within the deep,
Still chambers of the heart, a specter dim,
Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time,
Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold
And solemn finger to the beautiful
And holy visions, that have passed away,
And left no shadow of their loveliness
On the dead waste of life. That specter lifts
The coffin lid of Hope, and Joy, and Love,

And, bending mournfully above the pale,

Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers O'er what has passed to nothingness.

The year

Has gone, and, with it, many a glorious throng
Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow,
Its shadow in each heart. In its swift course
It waved its scepter o'er the beautiful,
And they are not. It laid its pallid hand
Upon the strong man; and the haughty form

« PředchozíPokračovat »