The sentences of this man were to Jurgis like the crashing of thunder in his soul; a flood of emotion surged up in him⁠—all his old hopes and longings, his old griefs and rages and despairs. All that he had ever felt in his whole life seemed to come back to him at once, and with one new emotion, hardly to be described. That he should have suffered such oppressions and such horrors was bad enough; but that he should have been crushed and beaten by them, that he should have submitted, and forgotten, and lived in peace⁠—ah, truly that was a thing not to be put into words, a thing not to be borne by a human creature, a thing of terror and madness! “What,” asks the prophet, “is the murder of them that kill the body, to the murder of them that kill the soul?” And Jurgis was a man whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to struggle⁠—who had made terms with degradation and despair; and now, suddenly, in one awful convulsion, the black and hideous fact was made plain to him! There was a falling in of all the pillars of his soul, the sky seemed to split above him⁠—he stood there, with his clenched hands upraised, his eyes bloodshot, and the veins standing out purple in his face, roaring in the voice of a wild beast, frantic, incoherent, maniacal.