And then I thought of the tombs that darken our land to-day, where the murdered, the legally murdered, lay buried. I thought of the graves more hopeless fur than them that entomb the dead,--the graves where lay the livin' dead. Dead souls bound to still breathin' bodies, dead hopes, ambitions, dead dreams of usefulness and respectability, happiness, dead purity, faith, honor, dead, all dead, all bound to the still breathin' body, by the festerin', putrid death-robes of helplessness and despair. There they lie chained to their dark tombs by links slight at first, but twisted by the hard old fingers of blind habit, to chains of iron, chains linked about, and eatin' into, not only the quiverin' flesh, but the frenzied brains, the hope less hearts, the ruined souls. Heavy, hopeless-lookin' vaults they are indeed, whose air is putrid with the sickenin' miasma of moral loathsomness and deseese; whose walls are painted with hideous pictures of murder, rapine, lust, starvation, woe, and despair, earthly and eternal ruin. Shapes of the dreadful past, the hopeless future, that these livin' dead stare upon with broodin' frenzy by night and by day. Oh the tombs, the countless, countless tombs, where lie these breathin' corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend to the sweet heavens! And less peaceful than the graves of the departed, these tombs themselves are full of the hopeless cries of the entombed, praying for help, praying for some strong hand to reach down and lift them out of their reeking, polluted, living death. The whole of our fair land is covered with jest such graves: its turf is tread down by the footprints of the mourners who go about the streets. They pray, they weep: the night is long, is long. But the morning will dawn at last. And the women,--daughters, wives, mothers,--who kneel with clasped hands beside the tombs, heaviest-eyed, deepest mourners, because most helpless. Lift up your heavy eyes: the sun is even now rising, that shall gild the sky at last. The mornin' light is even now dawnin' in the east. It shall fall first upon your uplifted brows, your prayerful eyes. Most blessed of God, because you loved most, sorrowed most. To you shall it be given to behold first the tall, fair angel of Resurection and Redemption, standin' at the grave's mouth. Into your hands shall be put the key to unlock the heavy doors, where your loved has lain.