“Here a deeper and serener charm
To all is given,
And blessed memories of the faithful dead
O’er wood and vale, and meadow-stream have shed
The holy hues of heaven.”

How indelibly does memory paint the image of a departed child upon the mother’s heart!  No flight of years; no distance from the grave in which he slumbers, can erase the image.  It will be ever fresh, and, with awakening power, mingle with her tears and glow in her fondest hopes.  Though time and distance and vicissitudes may calm her troubled heart, and cause her to settle down into tranquility of feeling; but these can never destroy the tenacity and vividness of her memory.  Even then those objects to which it fondly clings, become the theme of her holiest and her happiest thoughts; and she retains them with a passionate ardor, exceeded only by that with which she clung to the living child.  Her greatest pleasure is, to retire from the busy cares of the world, to some solitude where she may sit among flowers that remind her of the one that withered in her arms, and meditate upon him who slumbers beneath the clods of the valley.  Oh, these are sweet and precious moments to her; and the tears which are then drawn from the deep well-springs of reminiscence, are sacred to him with whom she in spirit there communes.  There with, rapture she remembers

  “All his winning ways,
  His pretty, playful smiles,
  His joy, his ecstasy,
  His tricks, his mimicry,
  And all his little wiles;
  Oh! these are recollections
  Round mothers’ hearts that cling—­
  That mingle with the tears
  And smiles of after years,
  With oft awakening!”

Memory links together the loved, ones of home though they be widely separated from each other, some on earth, and some in eternity.  There is a mystic chain which binds them together, and brings them in spirit near to each other and infuses, as it were, with electric power, a realizing sense of each other, while their past life under the same roof, “like shadows o’er them sweep.”  In the light of memory their faded forms are vividly brought back to view; they see each other as when they rambled over their childhood haunts; and the echo of their playful mirth comes booming back in deep reverberations through their souls.  In this respect the memory of the dead is a pleasure so deep and delicate, and withal so melancholy, yea, so painful, that the heart shrinks from its intensity.  This we experience when we ramble through the family graveyard, and bring within the sweep of recollection our past communion with the loved who slumber there.  There is a mysterious feeling awakened in our hearts,—­a feeling of peculiar melancholy, which, combines two opposite emotions,—­that of pleasure and that of pain.  These seem to embrace each other, and their union in our hearts affords us a strange enjoyment.  We enjoy the pain; the agony awakened by the remembrance of those who lie beneath the sod