left to feel—­the passions were wrenched and stunned by a blow, which was over, one may say, before it could be perceived; while in the wide-spread but more tedious desolation of typhus, the heart was left to brood over the thousand phases of love and misery which the terrible realities of the one, joined to the alarming exaggerations of the other, never failed to present.  In cholera, a few hours, and all was over; but in the awful fever which then prevailed, there was the gradual approach—­the protracted illness—­the long nights of racking pain—­day after day of raging torture—­and the dark period of uncertainty when the balance of human life hangs in the terrible equilibrium of suspense—­all requiring the exhibition of constant attention—­of the eye whose affection never sleeps—­the ear that is deaf only to every sound but the moan of pain—­the touch whose tenderness is felt as a solace, so long as suffering itself is conscious—­the pressure of the aching head—­the moistening of the parched and burning lips—­and the numerous and indescribable offices of love and devotedness, which always encompass, or should encompass, the bed of sickness and of death.  There was, we say, all this, and much more than the imagination itself, unaided by a severe acquaintance with the truth, could embody in its gloomiest conceptions.

In fact, Ireland during the season, or rather the year, we are describing, might be compared to one vast lazar-house filled with famine, disease and death.  The very skies of Heaven were hung with the black drapery of the grave; for never since, nor within the memory of man before it, did the clouds present shapes of such gloomy and funereal import.  Hearses, coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark emblems of mortality were reflected, as it were, on the sky, from the terrible work of pestilence and famine, which was going forward on the earth beneath them.  To all this, the thunder and lightning too, were constantly adding their angry peals, and flashing, as if uttering the indignation of Heaven against our devoted people; and what rendered such fearful manifestations ominous and alarming to the superstitious, was the fact of their occurrence in the evening and at night—­circumstances which are always looked upon With unusual terror and dismay.

To any person passing through the country, such a combination of startling and awful appearances was presented as has probably never been witnessed since.  Go where you might, every object reminded you of the fearful desolation that was progressing around you.  The features of the people were gaunt, their eyes wild and hollow, and their gait feeble and tottering.  Pass through the fields, and you were met by little groups bearing home on their shoulders, and that with difficulty, a coffin, or perhaps two of them.  The roads were literally black with funerals, and as you passed along from parish to parish, the death-bells were pealing forth, in slow but dismal tones, the gloomy triumph which pestilence was achieving over the face of our devoted country—­a country that each successive day filled with darker desolation and deeper mourning.