"I attempted, my dear friend, to write you on Tuesday, for I felt then that, all being over, I could calmly write of what had passed, and direct your feelings and my own to the future. But I knew from experience that a few days' delay would find you more in want of a letter; as the necessary exertion which attends a scene like that you have passed through occupies the whole mind while it is necessary to support it, but leaves, when it is passed, a vacuity which needs some external power to fill it. Perhaps I too easily found in this an excuse for leaving my letter unfinished, and now that I review it, I blush at my own weakness. I sought to relieve my own heart, instead of strengthening yours. I have been with you every moment since I last wrote you, and too fully realized all that you have suffered. At the moment I was writing you, that pure spirit was taking its flight. I felt it as by intuition, and needed not further confirmation. But it was a relief to know that his blessed spirit was for ever beyond the reach of pain and anguish; that it was exalted to its native home, there to realize all that his brightest hopes could anticipate of a glorious immortality. "I feel an almost total inability to write you on this subject. Could I talk to you, there would be time to enlarge on all the thoughts which it suggests. But they are so various, so interesting, so overpowering, that I know not on which to dwell. His virtues are too deeply imprinted on our hearts to receive any additional weight by enumeration. We can only go forward with them to that world where they shall meet a reward proportionate to their value. The remembrance of his character, while it awakens every emotion of affection which he excited while on earth, sheds on the heart a light which unfolds to the eye of faith its glorious perfection in heaven. Nothing in him can have escaped the mind of one so closely connected with him; friends need not to be reminded of what is imprinted in indelible characters on their hearts. But the thought that what we so loved and cherished is gone for ever from us, that the form by which we have held communion with the spirit is hid for ever from our view, the chilling realities of death and decay, as they appeal to our purest earthly feelings, are the most difficult to contend with. Our brightest visions of the future have a most powerful drawback in the horror with which nature shrinks from the sad appendages of death.