Soon the mud of that river filled the eyes and ears of him who years before had received defilement into his heart.

What seed he had sown, that Nature gave him as a harvest--good measure, heaped up, and shaken together.
History permits no man to escape the reflection that if, for the time being, individuals have escaped this moral law, nations have felt its full force.

Nature does, indeed, walk through the fields with footsteps so gentle as to disturb no drop of dew hanging upon the blade of grass.

Nature also hath her sterner aspect, and for the sons of iniquity her footsteps are earthquakes, her strokes are strokes of war and of pestilence.

When Sophocles worked out the law of moral retribution for King Oedipus and Antigone, his daughter, the poet might well have gone on to note that if the Grecian army had sacked the Trojan cities the time would come when the Roman fleet would sack her cities and make her sons to toil as captives.