1. The terrific and undefinable images of horror, that imagination affixes to the term _death_, are founded in an entire misconception. The word is the sign of no positive idea whatever. It conjures up a shadowy horror to the mind, finely delineated, as a poetic personage, by Milton; and implies some agony that is supposed to lie between the limits of existence and non-existence, or existence in another form. This is simple illusion. So long as we feel, death is not--and when we cease to feel, or commence feeling in a changed form, death has been:--_fuit mors_. So that the term imports a mere phantom of the imagination. In the words of Droz, ‘it is not yet; or it is past.’ If one can arrest the _punctum stans_, and the actual sensation, where waking consciousness terminates, and sleep commences, he can tell us, what death is. Every one is conscious of having passed through this change; but no one can give any account, what were his sensations in the dividing moment of interval between wakefulness and sleep. 2. Imagination is allowed to settle all the circumstances, and form all the associations belonging to the supposed agony of this event. It is one of the few important incidents in life, upon which reason is never allowed to fix a calm and severe scrutiny. It has been seen in a light, too sacred and terrible, to permit such a lustration. ‘It is dreadful,’ says common apprehension, ‘for it is the breaking up the long and tender partnership, and producing a separation between the body and the soul--dreadful, because it is the wages of sin, and is appointed to be a perpetual memorial of the righteous displeasure of God in view of sin;’ ‘dreadful,’ say others, who most unphilosophically believe that man was not originally intended to be mortal, ‘because a violence upon nature; dreadful, because a departure of the spirit from the regions of the living, and the light of the sun, into an unknown and eternal condition. Suns will revolve, moons wax and wane, years, revolutions, ages, counted by all the particles of mist in the sea, will elapse, but the place, whence the spirit is gone, will never know it more.’ ‘It is terrible,’ says common apprehension, ‘for it is often preceded and accompanied by spasm, and convulsive struggle.’ The psalmody, which we sing in church, speaks of the _ghastly paleness_, the _chill sweat_, and the _mortal coldness_, circumstances all, which, seen in other associations, would assume no aspect of peculiar terror.