It is well that the hope of recovery should occasionally light up in cases which are certain to end fatally, especially when the patient is the subject of protracted chronic disease. It breaks in upon that painful monotony of mind, which is otherwise apt to exist. It is not commonly well for any one, in any point of view, to have the certain expectation of death fastened in the mind week after week and month after month, even if he have all the while a clear view with the eye of faith of a glorious immortality beyond. This one unvaried state of thought and feeling, though commonly spoken of as exceedingly to be desired, is ordinarily neither so profitable nor so happy, as that condition of mind, in which the expectation of death is not so constantly present, but occasionally gives way to thoughts and emotions of quite a different character. The keeping the mind strained up to a certain state, and fixed upon one set of thoughts, is never either in sickness or in health profitable to the individual himself, or to others. And aside from this consideration, though the calm and fixed contemplation of approaching death has something noble in it, and challenges our admiration, still the triumph over death may be as signal, when there is occasionally an indulgence of the natural desire of life, and a shrinking back from the encounter with the king of terrors. The destruction of this love of life, and the utter extinction of the hope of a recovery, are by no means essential to perfect resignation. Indeed the highest degree of resignation may exist when the desire to live is so strong as to prompt the sufferer to catch with eagerness at the slightest grounds of hope even to the last. Incidental circumstances have much to do with the manner in which death is met. A cool temperament, the long continued cultivation of a stoical indifference in the midst of change and calamity, a morbid misanthropy, an habitual disposition to fatalism, the breaking up one after another of all the attachments to this world, the benumbing influence of disease or of medicine, long familiarity with suffering, and the consequent capability of enduring it, which is sometimes truly wonderful—some of these various circumstances may conspire to render submission to the necessity of the case easy, and give to the death-hour a calmness that is often erroneously supposed to arise from a true Christian resignation. The calmness thus induced is often an incidental adjunct to resignation, and is sometimes auxiliary to it, imparting to it firmness and steadiness in its manifestations. But it is in no wise essential to it, nor one of its elements.