It seems a greater pity that an accomplished worker with the hand should perish prematurely, than a person of great intellect; because intellectual arts may be cultivated in the next world, but not physical ones.
To trace out the influence of a frightful and disgraceful crime in debasing and destroying a character naturally high and noble, the guilty person being alone conscious of the crime.
A man, virtuous in his general conduct, but committing habitually some monstrous crime,–as murder,–and doing this without the sense of guilt, but with a peaceful conscience,–habit, probably, reconciling him to it; but something (for instance, discovery) occurs to make him sensible of his enormity. His horror then.
From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Passages from the American Note-Books.
Biblioklept 