“Do you not think, Doctor, that this dread of dying, which haunts most people like a fearful spectre--the good as well as the bad--is a very foolish thing? We are taught, from childhood, to look forward to death as the greatest of all calamities; as a change attended by indefinable terrors. Teachers and preachers ring in our ears the same dread chimes, thrilling the strongest nerves and appalling the stoutest hearts. Death is pictured to us as a grim monster; and we shudder as we look at the ghastly apparition. Now, all this comes from what is false. Death is not the crowning evil of our lives; but the door through which we pass, tranquilly, into that eternal world, which is our destined home. I hold in my thought a different picture of Death from that which affrighted me in childhood. The form is one of angelic beauty, and the countenance full of love. I know, that when I pass along the dark and narrow way that leads from this outer world of nature, to the inner world from which it has existence, that my hand will rest firmly in that of an angel, commissioned of God to guide my peaceful footsteps. Is not that a better faith?” “Yes, a better and a truer,” said I. “It is not the death passage that we need fear. That has in it no intrinsic evil. It is the sleep of mortality, and the rest is sweet to all. If we give place to fear, let it be for that state beyond the bourne, which will be unhappy in the degree that we are lovers of self and the world--that is, lovers of evil instead of good. As the tree falls, so it lies, Doctor. As our quality is at death, so will it remain to all eternity. Here is the just occasion for dread.” She would have kept on, but her attention was drawn away by the remark of a lady who came up at the moment. I left her side and passed to another part of the room; but her words, tone, and impressive manner remained with me. I turned my eyes often during the evening upon her pale, pure face, which seemed like a transparent veil through which the spirit half revealed itself. How greatly she had changed in five years! There had been trial and discipline; and she had come up from them purer for the ordeal. The flesh had failed; but the spirit had taken on strength and beauty. “How did Mrs. Montgomery impress you?” said I to my wife, as we sat down together on our return home. “As one ready to be translated,” she answered. “I was at a loss to determine which was the most beautiful, she or Blanche.” “You cannot make a comparison between them as to beauty,” I remarked. “Not as to beauty in the same degree. The beauty of Blanche was queenly; that of her mother angelic. All things lovely in nature were collated, and expressed themselves in the younger as she stood blushing in the ripeness of her charms; while all things lovely in the soul beamed forth from the countenance of the elder. And so, as I have said, I was at a loss to determine which was most beautiful.”