'Struck by so fair a death, we stood Awhile in sad admiring mood: Then hastened back, to say That he, the praised and loved of all, Is deaf for ever to your call: That on this self-same day, 'When here presented should have been The close of his fictitious scene, His life's true scene was o'er: We seemed, in solemn silence awed, To hear the "Farewell and applaud," Which he may speak no more. 'Of tears the rain gave prophecy: The nuptial dance of comedy Yields to the funeral train. Assemble where his pyre must burn: Honour his ashes in their urn: And on another day return To hear his songs again.' _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ A beautiful fiction. _Mr. Falconer._ If it be a fiction. The supernatural is confined to the dream. All the rest is probable; and I am willing to think it true, dream and all. _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ You are determined to connect the immaterial with the material world, as far as you can. _Mr. Falconer._ I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then. _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Certainly, there is much in the material world to displease sensitive and imaginative minds; but I do not know any one who has less cause to complain of it than you have. You are surrounded with all possible comforts, and with all the elements of beauty, and of intellectual enjoyment. _Mr. Falconer._ It is not my own world that I complain of. It is the world on which I look 'from the loopholes of retreat.' I cannot sit here, like one of the Gods of Epicurus, who, as Cicero says, was satisfied with thinking, through all eternity, 'how comfortable he was.'{1} I look with feelings of intense pain on the mass of poverty and crime; of unhealthy, unavailing, unremunerated toil, blighting childhood in its blossom, and womanhood in its prime; of 'all the oppressions that are done under the sun.' 1 Comprehende igitur animo, et propone ante oculos, deura nihil aliud in omni aeternitate, nisi, Mihi pulchre est, et, Ego beatus sum, cogitant em.--Cicero: _De natura deorum_, 1. i. c. 41. _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I feel with you on all these points; but there is much good in the world; more good than evil, I have always maintained. They would have gone off in a discussion on this point, but the French cook warned them to luncheon.