as if I were not like themselves.  My very mortality seemed less obvious to their imaginations when contrasted with the hundreds for whom my hand prepared the last narrow dwelling-house, which was to shroud for ever their altered faces from sorrowful eyes.  Where I came, there came heaviness of heart, mournfulness, and weeping.  Laughter was hushed at my approach; conversation ceased; darkness and silence fell around my steps—­the darkness and the silence of death.  Gradually I became awake to my situation.  I no longer attempted to hold free converse with my fellow men.  I suffered the gloom of their hearts to overshadow mine.  My step crept slowly and stealthily into their dwellings; my voice lowered itself to sadness and monotony; I pressed no hand in token of companionship; no hand pressed mine, except when wrung with agony, some wretch, whose burden was more than he could bear restrained me for a few moments of maddened and convulsive grief, from putting the last finishing stroke to my work, and held me back to gaze yet again on features which I was about to cover from his sight.  It is well that God, in his unsearchable wisdom, hath made death loathsome to us.  It is well that an undefined and instinctive shrinking within us, makes what we have loved for long years, in a few hours

  “That lifeless thing, the living fear.”

It is well that the soul hath scarcely quitted the body ere the work of corruption is begun.  For if, even thus, mortality clings to the remnants of mortality, with ‘love stronger than death;’ if, as I have seen it, warm and living lips are pressed to features where the gradually sinking eye and hollow cheek speak horribly of departed life; what would it be if the winged soul left its tenement of clay, to be resolved only into a marble death; to remain cold, beautiful, and imperishable; every day to greet our eyes; every night to be watered with our tears?  The bonds which hold men together would be broken; the future would lose its interest in our minds; we should remain sinfully mourning the idols of departed love, whose presence forbade oblivion of their loveliness; and a thin and scattered population would wander through the world as through the valley of the shadow of death!  How often have I been interrupted when about to nail down a coffin, by the agonized entreaties of some wretch to whom the discoloured clay bore yet the trace of beauty, and the darkened lid seemed only closed in slumber!  How often have I said, ’Surely that heart will break with its woe!’ and yet, in a little while, the bowed spirit rose again, the eye sparkled, and the lip smiled, because the dead were covered from their sight; and that which is present to man’s senses is destined to affect him far more powerfully than the dreams of his imagination or memory.  How often, too, have I seen the reverse of the picture I have just drawn; when the pale unconscious corse has lain abandoned in its loveliness, and grudging hands have scantily