Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/287

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MURDER OF ZAWIS BEFORE HLUBOKA
283

essences is banished from multitudes whose exhausted strength is famished by its loss. The nourishment that would mingle with our constituent elements, and fill them with life and energy, yielding health and cheerfulness, is brushed from hungry lips, and men are consigned to want, and waste, and the breaking down of tissues, decay, and disease and death. The divine gifts implanted in herb and fruit, whereof the human frame is but the inspissated combination, is banished from its natural completion in its application to human nourishment; and the supernal virtues of love, generosity, justice, and purity that are diffused through the charms and the riches of nature, and would adorn the human soul if instilled through nature’s bounties, are violently banished from society. Thus cruelty, treachery, hatred, and vicious destructiveness are being implanted in men’s hearts through denial of the enrichment that would infuse tenderness of fecling together with richness of the blood. Poverty of the mind springs from depravation of the body; and so long as men hate and persecute and torture, and deaden the sensibilities of their frame, the wonder of all creation, so long also must they inflict on themselves vices of the mind. As the world is filled with mortification of the one it droops and is cursed with the depravities and vices of the other. Virtue is generally good food, warmth, absence of anxiety, freedom from the despair in feelings that spring from wasted and unhealthy bodies, and the consequent fierce longings that produce a tendency in the very flesh to reproduce the same con-