outstripped me, and left me looking wistfully after them. Such incidents make the future at least as real and familiar to me as the outside world; and every permanent invalid will say the same: and we must not be wondered at if we speak of that great interest of ours oftener, and with more familiarity, than others use. Neither should we be wondered at if we speak with a confidence which some cannot share, of meeting these our friends, and communing with them, when we ourselves depart. We have no power to doubt of this, if we believe at all that we shall live hereafter. I have said how intensely we feel that our spiritual part is indestructible. We feel no less vividly that of that spiritual part the affections are the true vitality; that they are the soul within the soul--our inmost life. The affections cannot exist without their objects; and our congenial friends--the brethren of our soul--therefore survive as surely as God survives. If God is recognisable by the worshipper, and Christ by the Christian, the beloved are recognisable by those who love. To demur to this to the sufferer who (all other life being weakened and embittered) lives by the affections, divine and human, is, to him, much like doubting whether the atmosphere bears any relation to music, or the human understanding to truth. If there are hours when, through pain and weakness, we would fain decline existence altogether, as a sick and wearied child frets at sunshine and music, and would rather sleep in darkness and silence, there is no moment in which we do not believe, as if we saw, that the departed righteous are in communion, full and active, in exact proportion as the ardour and fidelity of their mutual love deserves and necessitates. We believe this as if we saw it, whatever be our own immediate mood, as, on every night of winter, however cloudy, we are well assured that the constellations are in the sky,--that Orion and the Wain have risen and are circling, steady, clear and serene, whatever be the state of the elements below them. As the life of the sick-room must necessarily be, whether its objects be high or low, one of faith and not of sight, those who visit it may easily perceive that it is not the appropriate field for demonstration. In its own province Demonstration is supreme. There let it dictate and pronounce. But we sufferers inhabit a separate region of human experience, where there is another and a prophetic oracle; where the voice of Demonstration itself must be dumb before that of the steadfast, incommunicable assurance of the soul. Here are some of the aspects of Death to the long-suffering Invalid. TEMPER. “We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body.” SHAKSPERE. “Behold thy trophies within thee, not without thee. Lead thine own captivity captive, and be Cæsar unto thyself.”