the remainder of life to the memory of the departed, and would regard with sincere horror the suggestion that it was possible they should ever marry again; but after a while they do.  And you will even find men, beyond middle age, who made a tremendous work at their first wife’s death, and wore very conspicuous mourning, who in a very few months may be seen dangling after some new fancy, and who in the prospect of their second marriage evince an exhilaration that approaches to crackiness.  It is usual to speak of such things in a ludicrous manner; but I confess the matter seems to me anything but one to laugh at.  I think that the rapid dying out of warm feelings, the rapid change of fixed resolutions, is one of the most sorrowful subjects of reflection which it is possible to suggest.  Ah, my friends, after we die, it would not be expedient, even if it were possible, to come back.  Many of us would not like to find how very little they miss us.  But still, it is the manifest intention of the Creator that strong feelings should be transitory.  The sorrowful thing is when they pass and leave absolutely no trace behind them.  There should always he some corner kept in the heart for a feeling which once possessed it all.  Let us look at the case temperately.  Let us face and admit the facts.  The healthy body and mind can get over a great deal; but there are some things which it is not to the credit of our nature should ever be entirely got over.  Here are sober truth, and sound philosophy, and sincere feeling together, in the words of Philip van Artevelde:—­

  “Well, well, she’s gone,
  And I have tamed my sorrow.  Pain and grief
  Are transitory things, no less than joy;
  And though they leave us not the men we were,
  Yet they do leave us.  You behold me here,
  A man bereaved, with something of a blight
  Upon the early blossoms of his life,
  And its first verdure,—­having not the less
  A living root, and drawing from the earth
  Its vital juices, from the air its powers: 
  And surely as man’s heart and strength are whole,
  His appetites regerminate, his heart
  Reopens, and his objects and desires
  Spring up renewed.”

But though Artevelde speaks truly and well, you remember how Mr. Taylor, in that noble play, works out to our view the sad sight of the deterioration of character, the growing coarseness and harshness, the lessening tenderness and kindliness, which are apt to come with advancing years.  Great trials, we know, passing over us, may influence us either for the worse or the better; and unless our nature is a very obdurate and poor one, though they may leave us, they will not leave us the men we were.  Once, at a public meeting, I heard a man in eminent station make a speech.  I had never seen him before; but I remembered an inscription which I had read, in a certain churchyard far away, upon the stone that marked the resting-place of his young wife, who had died many years before.  I