From your Exposition, sir, I feel that the meaning of the First Chapter of the Analogy is dawning into clearer and clearer light. NORTH. Inconsiderately, my dear sir, we seem indeed to ourselves to know what Death is; but this is from confounding the Thing and its Effects. For we see effects: at first, the stoppage of certain sensible actions--afterwards, the dissolution of certain sensible parts. But _what_ it is that has happened--_wherefore_ the blood no longer flows--the limbs no longer move--_that_ we do not see. We do not see it with our eyes--we do not discern it by any inference of our understanding. It is a _fact_ that seems to lie shrouded for ever from our faculties in awful and impenetrable mystery. That fact--the produce of an instant--which has happened _within, and in the dark_--that fact come to pass, in an indivisible point of time--that stern fact--ere the happening of which the Man was alive--an inhabitant of this breathing world--united to ourselves--our Father, Brother, Friend--at least our Fellow-Creature--by the happening, _he_ is gone--is for ever irrecoverably sundered from this world, and from us its inhabitants--is DEAD--and that which lies outstretched before our saddened eyes is only his mortal remains--a breathless corpse--an inanimate, insensible clod of clay:--Upon that interior _sudden_ fact--_sudden_, at last, how slowly and gradually soever prepared--since the utmost attenuation of a thread is a thing totally distinct from its ending, from its becoming no thread at all, and since, up to that moment, there was a possibility that some extraordinary, perhaps physical application might for an hour or a few minutes have rallied life, or might have reawakened consciousness, and eye, and voice--upon that elusive _Essence_ and _self_ of Death no curious searching of ours has laid, or, it may be well assumed, will ever lay hold. When the organs of sense no longer minister to Perception, or the organs of motion to any change of posture--when the blood stopped in its flow thickens and grows cold--and the fair and stately form, the glory of the Almighty's Hand, the burning shrine of a Spirit that lately rejoiced in feeling, in thought, and in power, lies like a garment done with and thrown away--"a kneaded clod"--ready to lose feature and substance--and to yield back its atoms to the dominion of the blind elements from which they were gathered and compacted--_What is Death_? And what grounds have we for inferring that an event manifested to us as a phenomenon of the Body, which alone we touch, and hear, and see, has or has not reached into the Mind, which is for us Now just as it always was, a Thing utterly removed and exempt from the cognisance and apprehension of our bodily senses? The Mind, or Spirit, the unknown Substance, in which Feeling, and Thought, and Will, and the Spring of Life were--was united to this corporeal frame; and, being united to it, animated it, poured through it sensibility and motion, glowing