Can honor’s voice provoke the silent dust,
    Or flatt’ry soothe the dull, cold ear of death?

Solomon, summing up this question, said: 

     For the living know that they shall die:  but the dead know not any
     thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them
     is forgotten.

     Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;
     neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is
     done under the sun.

To human reason the death of him we mourn was untimely.  He was born May 31, 1837, and died October 15, 1891.  He was therefore in the prime of manhood, and apparently had many years of useful life before him.  But death sometimes strangely selects his victims.  No season, no station, no age is exempt from his fatal shafts.  When death comes to the aged as the end of a fully completed life we regard it as natural.  But when death comes to the young, the gifted, and the promising, we with our finite vision look upon it as sad and mysterious.  We are constantly reminded that—­

    The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
      And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
    Await alike the inevitable hour. 
      The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

It is creditable to our humanity that at the grave animosities are buried, and those who speak of the dead remember their virtues and pass over their frailties.

     Death is a mighty mediator.  There all the flames of rage are
     extinguished, hatred is appeased, and angelic pity, like a weeping
     sister, bends with gentle and close embrace over the funeral urn.

     The reconciling grave swallows distinction first that made us foes;
     there all lie down in peace together.

To the grave, “the world’s sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil,” we are all hastening.  Earth’s highest station and meanest place ends in the common receptacle to which we shall all be taken.  Dark and gloomy indeed would be the grave without a hope in a personal immortality, a belief that the soul survives the body, and that to this immortal part the tomb is the gate to heaven.  When one feels like Theodore Parker when he said: 

When this stiffened body goes down to the tomb, sad, silent, and remorseless, I feel there is no death for the man.  That clod which yonder dust shall cover is not my brother.  The dust goes to its place; man to his own.  It is then I feel my immortality.  I look through the grave into heaven.  I ask no miracle, no proof, no reasoning for me; I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality.  I am conscious of eternal life.

Or like Byron when he wrote: 

     I feel my immortality oversweep all pains, all tears, all time, all
     fears, and peal, like the eternal thunders of the deep into my ears
     this truth—­thou livest forever!