Oh life! Oh world and worldly honour! how poor and vain, how worthless and worse than worthless, how bitterly mocking do ye seem in the presence of death, the death of the best-beloved! What now to him was his political victory? what the success of his party? the cause of the country? aye, of the world, or of humanity? Nothing, and less than nothing! if that could be. He had called her “immortal”—making what stand he could against the overwhelming sense of annihilation that had fallen upon him. Alas! alas! he felt now as if nothing were immortal but his own bitter, insupportable grief; as if with her all things had passed from him—leaving only insufferable sorrow. And he lifted up his voice, and wept—“Oh, Rosalie! Rosalie! life of my life!” But let us not intrude upon a grief so sacred. Pass we by the next few mournful days. Pass we by the funeral, where all who had known the angel in her mortal life, gathered around to gaze once more upon her sweet face, drop a tear to her lovely memory, and go away, haply, wiser, and more loving than they came. Pass by the time when the news of her departure from this earth reached her distant Western home, and many other homes that felt the blessing of her influence and mourned her loss; and where to this day the memory of Rosalie is still fresh and beautiful, sweet and fragrant—even as that of some fair saint, who lived, and loved, and toiled, and suffered to benefit humanity, to whom she was given; and where the present thought of Rosalie is as that of some bright guardian angel, still blessing from heaven those she loved upon the earth. Pass to the time when Mr. Sutherland’s official duties called him to Washington City. The first vehemence and severity of his sorrow was over—but not the sorrow: it had settled rather into a fixed and silent melancholy, from which no earthly interest was strong enough to arouse him. Even the fine powers of his mind seemed palsied for a time. He reached Washington, the goal of his young ambition; was duly sworn in, and took his appointed seat in the Senate Chamber. But all this passed to him like a dream, or at least like a form in which he had no vital interest. It was well for Mark Sutherland that he was a man of very imposing presence—that his bearing was dignified and commanding, and his fine Roman features, even in the deepened repose, as in a painting, or a marble bust, still expressed a high degree of intellect; as, through that fortuitous accident of physique, taken together with his antecedents, which were not those of a negligent politician—his mental abstraction passed for the pride and reserve of a lofty mind—which it was _not_—rather than for the profound indifference, amounting almost to apathy, of a deeply stricken heart—as it _was_.