"That is a very touching incident," said my friend, when I had related this conversation to her. "If all earth-dwellers were as spiritually-minded as yonder poet's poet-father, and were as capable of apprehending how real a thing spiritual companionship may be, our dead would soon cease to be called our 'lost ones,' and death would no longer be spoken of as the 'great parting.' Death gives us more friends than he takes from us, and often brings us nearer to those who have gone before, than we were during their lifetime. Though it is nineteen hundred years since our Master, Christ, trod the earth a visible Presence, yet He is more to the world to-day, and nearer to each separate soul in it, than ever He was to the men and women who touched garments with Him when He walked the fields of Palestine. _Then_ such as sought His aid had often to wait His coming in weariness and weakness of soul, whilst not seldom it happened that they could not obtain access to him 'because of the throng,' and we read even of one who was fain to climb a tree to catch a glimpse of Him in passing. _Now_ He stands by each of us, waiting and willing to hear. _Then_ they had to go to Him; _now_ He comes to us, and is with us always and in every place. I tell you that Jesus Christ is as real a Presence to-day in the streets of London or Boston, as He was in the homes of Nazareth or Jerusalem. He is as near to us now as He was to Martha and to Mary, and is as willing to help and hear you or me, as He was to heal the sick, or to pardon the dying thief;" and then in a low, sweet voice she repeated the following lines from Whittier's poem, "Our Master":-- "But warm, sweet, tender, even yet A present help is He; And faith has still its Olivet, And love its Galilee. "The healing of His seamless dress Is by our beds of pain; We touch Him in life's throng and press, And we are whole again. "Through Him the first fond prayers are said, Our lips of childhood frame, The last low whispers of our dead Are burdened with His name." "The thought that the 'last low whispers' of the loved ones who have left us were 'burdened' with the Name which we first learned to lisp at our mother's knee is a very tender and beautiful one," she said reverently, after a moment's silence. "We seem to see our own fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers, linked to ourselves, and through us to our children and our children's children, until all the generations of the world--past, present, and future--become as one family in a great bond of fellowship, even as all the joy and sorrow of humanity find one common home in the heart of the Lord Christ who loves us."