"It shall not live. Hitherto I have hoarded up mementoes and monuments of the past; been a worshiper of all heirlooms; a fond filer away of letters, locks of hair, bits of ribbon, flowers, and the thousand-and-one minutenesses which love and memory think they sanctify:--but it is forever over now! If to me any memory shall henceforth be dear, I will not mummy it in a visible memorial for every passing beggar's dust to gather on. Love's museum is vain and foolish as the Catacombs, where grinning apes and abject lizards are embalmed, as, forsooth, significant of some imagined charm. It speaks merely of decay and death, and nothing more; decay and death of endless innumerable generations; it makes of earth one mold. How can lifelessness be fit memorial of life?--So far, for mementoes of the sweetest. As for the rest--now I know this, that in commonest memorials, the twilight fact of death first discloses in some secret way, all the ambiguities of that departed thing or person; obliquely it casts hints, and insinuates surmises base, and eternally incapable of being cleared. Decreed by God Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the last scene of the last act of man's play;--a play, which begin how it may, in farce or comedy, ever hath its tragic end; the curtain inevitably falls upon a corpse. Therefore, never more will I play the vile pigmy, and by small memorials after death, attempt to reverse the decree of death, by essaying the poor perpetuating of the image of the original. Let all die, and mix again! As for this--this!--why longer should I preserve it? Why preserve that on which one can not patient look? If I am resolved to hold his public memory inviolate,--destroy this thing; for here is the one great, condemning, and unsuborned proof, whose mysticalness drives me half mad.--Of old Greek times, before man's brain went into doting bondage, and bleached and beaten in Baconian fulling-mills, his four limbs lost their barbaric tan and beauty; when the round world was fresh, and rosy, and spicy, as a new-plucked apple;--all's wilted now!--in those bold times, the great dead were not, turkey-like, dished in trenchers, and set down all garnished in the ground, to glut the damned Cyclop like a cannibal; but nobly envious Life cheated the glutton worm, and gloriously burned the corpse; so that the spirit up-pointed, and visibly forked to heaven! "So now will I serve thee. Though that solidity of which thou art the unsolid duplicate, hath long gone to its hideous church-yard account;--and though, God knows! but for one part of thee it may have been fit auditing;--yet will I now a second time see thy obsequies performed, and by now burning thee, urn thee in the great vase of air! Come now!"