declines to picture the long future of solitude that lies before us. We cannot understand that we shall never again listen to the tones of the familiar voice; never feel the touch of the gentle hand; never be encouraged by the warm embrace that tells us we are loved, or find a refuge from miserable thoughts and the vexations of the world in the affectionate and ever-open heart. All this is too hard for us. We long for a resurrection; we should believe in it if we could; we do believe in it in sleep, when our feelings are free to roam at pleasure, unrestrained by the chilling presence of the material world. In dreams the old life is repeated again and again. Sometimes the lost one is beside us as of old, and we are quite untroubled by the thought of parting. Sometimes there is a strange and confusing consciousness that the great calamity has happened, or has been thought to happen, but that now we are again together, and that a new life has succeeded upon death. Or the dream takes a less definite form. We are united now; but along with our happiness in the union there is an oppressive sense of some mysterious terror clouding our enjoyment. We are afraid that it is an unsubstantial, shadowy being that is with us; the least touch may dissipate its uncertain existence; the slightest illness may extinguish its feeble breath. Granting only a strong emotion and a lively phantasy, we may comprehend at once how, in many lands, to many mourners, the images of their dreams may also become the visions of their waking hours. They see him again; they know that he is not gone; he is beside them still. But for us, who live in a calmer age, and see with scientific eyes, there is no such comfort. Not to us can the bodily forms of those who have gone before us to the grave appear again in all the loveliness of life. In the first shock of our bereavement we may indeed indulge in some such visionary hope; but as day after day passes by and leaves us in a solitude that does but deepen with the lapse of time, we learn to understand only too well that we are bereft forever. Hope gradually dwindling to a fainter and fainter remnant, is crushed at last by the miserable certainty of profound despair. Yet even then, the mind of man refuses to accept its fate. The scene of the reunion, which we cannot but so ardently desire, is postponed to another season and to a better world. Many are they to whom this final hope is an enduring consolation, but if even that should fail us in the hour of darkness, as the more primitive and simpler hope failed before it; if here again emotion is reluctantly compelled to yield to reason; then there is still one refuge in despondency, and a refuge of which we can never be deprived. It is the thought that death, so cruel now, will one day visit us with a kinder touch; and that the tomb, which already holds the nearest and the dearest within its grasp, will open to receive us also in our turn to its everlasting peace.