Every wretch has a modicum of good in him, and in
spite of the preponderance of evil in Burr, had he been born under
kindly Southern skies with a gold spoon in his mouth, if, when ambitions
developed, he had had but to stretch out his hand to pluck the prizes of
life, instead of exercising the basest talents of his brain to overreach
more fortunate men, why it is possible that his nature might not have
hardened into a glacier: its visible third dazzling and symmetrical, its
deadly bulk skulking below the surface of the waters which divided the
two parts of him from his victims; might have died in the chaste
reclusion of an ancestral four-poster, beneficiaries at his side. But
that immalleable mind lacked the strong fibre of logic and
foresight--which is all that moral force amounts to--that lifts a man
triumphant above his worst temptations; and he paid the bitter and
hideous penalty in a poverty, loneliness, and living death that would
have moved the theologians of his blood to the uneasy suspicion that
punishment is of this earth, a logical sequence of foolish and
short-sighted acts.
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