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It gives a terrible form and a horrible voice to everything beautiful and musical without. It is said of Bessus, a native of Pelonia, in Greece: — Being one day seen by his neighbours pulling down some birds' nests, and passionately destroying the young, they severely reproved him for his illnature and cruelty to those little innocent creatures that seemed to court his protection. He replied that their notes were to him insufferable, as they never ceased twitting of the murder of his father. The music of the sweet songsters of the grove are as the shrieks of hell to a guilty conscience startled from its grave. Let Byron describe its anguish, for who felt it more than he? —

"The mind that broods o'er guilty woes,

Is like the scorpion girt by fire;

In circle narrowing as it glows.

The flames around their captive close,

Till inly searched by thousand throes,

And maddening in her ire,

One sad and sole relief she knows,

The sting she nourished for her foes

Whose venom never yet was vain,

Gives but one pang and cures all pain,

And darts into her desperate brain:

So do the dark in soul expire,

Or live like scorpion girt by fire.

So writhes the mind remorse has riven,

Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven,

Darkness above, despair beneath,

Around it flame, within it death."

(D. Thomas, D. D.)Torments of conscience: — It is said of Charles IX., that he could never bear to lie awake at night unless his thoughts were diverted by the strains of music in an adjoining apartment; and of Tiberius, it is asserted that he declared to his senators that he suffered death daily.

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KJV: Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was done by him: and he was perplexed, because that it was said of some, that John was risen from the dead;

WEB: Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was done by him; and he was very perplexed, because it was said by some that John had risen from the dead,