After a life, then, of action, and of temptation, of false hopes, ill placed affections, frivolous desires and enjoyments, and perhaps impious and guilty occupations, how happy he who has the wisdom to break away from them _himself_, before inexorable fate calls him, and who cleanses and prepares his spirit for the great change it is destined to undergo. I will not enter here upon the graver tenets of religion, but surely we may believe that he who sees in time the nature of sin, and disentangles himself from its snares—who spends the latter years of his life in a sincere endeavor to become what he ought to be, and to release his spirit from the world before his body is called away, if he cannot wholly efface the traces of sin, may soften them. For my part, although not an old man, I begin already to look upon human life more as a spectator than an actor, and to feel myself within the sublime and mysterious attraction of another world. I distrust the effect upon me of the collisions, temptations and pleasures which I may yet have to encounter—and I feel a hesitation even in wishing for wealth or worldly honors. The idea of a hereafter—of the actual visible presence of my Maker—is becoming every day less remote and more familiar to me. It hushes the voice of indignation, and checks the impulse of contempt—which, when I keep my eyes on this world alone, I cannot always master. It teaches me that my mortal part, as far as related to earthly things, is a brief, passing shadow—that the world is but the reflection of one point in the career of the soul—that human vice and folly are but mysteries of nature, and that human passions were given us as our slaves—not our masters. No medicine—no magnetism can have a more striking influence than this thought, upon the physical as well as the moral part of me; and when I enter the chamber where a dead man is lying, I feel all that is _bad_ within me so rebuked, silenced and destroyed—and all that is good so awakened, so pure, sustaining and holy, that I have little enthusiasm to search after the vain phantoms of mere earthly philosophy, or earthly happiness. I see only the form of religion, ever calm, ever young, standing above the wreck of the mortal universe, and pointing to another and a better one. What a powerful stroke of dramatic art is it then in our great poet to throw this idea, not into the voice of a sage or a preacher, but to announce it to startled generations from the dim faded lips of a suffering spirit.