On The Edge of a Precipice

"It grieves me to hear you speak thus, Miriam," said Hilda, whose
natural and cheerful piety was shocked by her friend's gloomy view of
human destinies. "It seems to me that there is no chasm, nor any hideous
emptiness under our feet, except what the evil within us digs. If there
be such a chasm, let us bridge it over with good thoughts and deeds, and
we shall tread safely to the other side. It was the guilt of Rome, no
doubt, that caused this gulf to open; and Curtius filled it up with his
heroic self-sacrifice and patriotism, which was the best virtue that the
old Romans knew. Every wrong thing makes the gulf deeper; every right
one helps to fill it up. As the evil of Rome was far more than its good,
the whole commonwealth finally sank into it, indeed, but of no original
necessity."

"Well, Hilda, it came to the same thing at last," answered Miriam
despondingly.

"Doubtless, too," resumed the sculptor (for his imagination was greatly
excited by the idea of this wondrous chasm), "all the blood that the
Romans shed, whether on battlefields, or in the Coliseum, or on the
cross,--in whatever public or private murder,--ran into this fatal gulf,
and formed a mighty subterranean lake of gore, right beneath our feet.
The blood from the thirty wounds in Caesar's breast flowed hitherward,
and that pure little rivulet from Virginia's bosom, too! Virginia,
beyond all question, was stabbed by her father, precisely where we are
standing."