Page:Olney Hymns - 1840.djvu/17

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lie and if he had been startled into the exclamation, "How can these things be!" he would have answered himself, and silenced unbelief, by saying "The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.

We pass to the exhibition of another portrait, of which it may emphatically be affirmed and he who penned the lines understood well the incommunicable bitterness of heart which they imply—

"This is a sight for Pity to peruse,

Till she resemble faintly what she views;

Till Sympathy contract a kindred pain,

Pierced with the woes which she laments in vain."

One day, in the month of December, 1763, a sufferer under the most deplorable of human maladies was brought to the house of a medical practitioner, at a small town, in a midland county of England, and left under his care. The patient was little advanced in manhood, but sorrow had done the work of years on his debilitated frame and faded cheek, while some thing more than sorrow had wrought a sadder ruin within, where no eye could search out the cause, unless it could see into the invisible world, and discern the spirit itself within the tabernacle of clay. Rea son had been overthrown, and imagination, usurping its seat, reigned as "lord of misrule," through all the region of thought, over all the faculties of the soul. He was a member of the younger branch of an illustrious house. He, too, (like the former subject of consideration,) had early lost his mother, and being a delicate child, that loss was to him in every way in calculable and irreparable. At school his spirit had been rebuked and prostrated by the tyranny of an elder boy, who exercised such fiend-like dominion over him that he was afraid to lift up his eyes higher