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About this time I did light on that dreadful story of that miserable mortal, Francis Spira, a book that was to my troubled spirit as salt when rubbed into a fresh wound; every groan of that man with all the rest of his actions in his dolours, as his tears, his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his wringing of hands, was as knives and daggers in my soul, especially that sentence of his was frightful to me: "Man knows the beginning of sin, but who bounds the issues thereof?" We never read anything like Spira's experience and Grace Abounding and Giant Despair's dungeon in the books of our day.
Ready-to-halt, that Great-heart delivered from Slaygood the giant, when he was rifling him and about to pick his bones, for Slaygood was of the nature of the flesh-eaters and Great-heart killed Giant Despair too but I am doubting Giant Despair's come alive again, for a' the story book I find him busy at my heart whiles."
"Just at that place where you saw the monument, I fought the battle through, and won. But I was in Giant Despair's dungeon two weeks at that. It was after I escaped that I fought the fight I won. I had got out of the dungeon by using the key of Promise; but the weather was foul, and the giants caught me at that spot. "The battle was a long one.
Bunyan had his intervals of "sunshine-weather" when Giant Despair's fits came on him, and the giant "lost the use of his hand." Texts of Scripture would give him a "sweet glance," and flood his soul with comfort. But these intervals of happiness were but short-lived.
And the problem which confronted her she saw very clearly, although she was unable to solve it. The problem was not new, indeed, it has been Despair's conundrum since the world began: Whose fault that my life has been as it is? In her despair, doubting, she cried: "Is there really a God, as Mammy Maria told me?
And if the martyr to o'er-sicklied refinement to sentiment too etherialised for the world, where God hath placed thee ideal woes have stamped a wrinkle on the brow, and ideal dreams now constitute thy pleasure and thy bane: for such as thou art! living on feeling's excess soaring to rapture's heights or sinking to despair's abyss Naples is not fitting!
"Vase am I," she thought, "vase brimful of despair's direst essence. Farewell, Perdita! farewell, poor girl! never again will you see yourself thus; luxury and wealth are no longer yours; in the excess of your poverty you may envy the homeless beggar; most truly am I without a home!
It is a fine lesson in Christian hope to descend into Giant Despair's dungeon and hear the older pilgrim groaning and the younger pilgrim consoling him, and, again, to stand on the bank of the last river and hear Hopeful holding up Christian's drowning head. "Be of good cheer, my brother, for I feel the bottom, and it is good!" Bless Hopeful for that, all you whose deathbeds are still before you.
And that very hour she heard him speak her name, he cried aloud in death's jaws and despair's. "Margaret!" Account for it those who can. I cannot. In the guest chamber of a Dominican convent lay a single stranger, exhausted by successive and violent fits of nausea, which had at last subsided, leaving him almost as weak as Margaret lay that night in Holland.
How shall we attain to walk its streets all the rest of our days with our staff in our hand? How shall we hope to see our boys and our girls playing in the streets of Beulah, and eating all their days of its sweet and its healing fruits? How shall we and our children with us henceforth escape the Slough of Despond, and Giant Despair's dungeon, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death?
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