‘Not to thy eternal resting place, Shalt thou retire alone: * * * * Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world, with kings, The powerful of the earth, the wise, the good, Fair forms and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills, Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods, rivers, that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks, That make the meadows green, and, poured round all, Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste, Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man.’ 6. Philosophers and moralists will readily admit, that the only easy and adequate remedy for the fear of death is the hope of immortality. On the other hand, they, whose vocation it is to question and decry the aids, which reason and philosophy offer in the case, as sullen, cold, stoical, will not deny, that ‘innumerable’ examples have been offered in all countries, and in all time, of men, who, in virtue of no higher discipline than that of reason and philosophy, have met death with such unshrinking and invincible firmness, as could hardly have been rendered more illustrious by any additional motives. They have shown, beyond all question, that nature has furnished us with a power of resistance, which, when rightly called forth, enables us to triumph over fear and death. The pagans of ancient story, the unbelieving of christian lands, the red men of our forests, offer us demonstrations to any extent. I am aware, in what places this simplest of all truths is weakly denied. Those, for whom I write, are of the number who exact the truth; and I have no fear to declare it; nor would I contend for a moment with such as deny this fact. But I am not the less sensible, that the triumph, in these cases, is bitter and painful. It can only be obtained by a violence done to instinctive nature, connected with innumerable revulsions and horrors, and to all those ineffable clingings to earth, and shrinkings from the first step into the unknown land, that are partly the heritage of nature, and partly the result of the concurrent influence of all our institutions. It is a violence to all the passions, affections, hopes and fears fostered by the earth. But the victory has been wrought, and can be wrought, even though the bosom, in which it is wrought become as of iron.