It marks a strange perversity in human nature, that we are wont to offer nothing but images of terror--no stars of cheering light--to those who lie imprisoned in the darkness of a sick-bed, when the glitter of the dew of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are frequently vented upon the dying, which would be withheld from the living in all their vigor; as if the sick patient was to console those in health. There stands no spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber to awaken a cheering smile on that nerveless, colorless countenance; but only confessors, lawyers, and doctors, who order everything, and relatives who lament at everything. There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the circumstance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the sufferer, thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the old springtide waters of pious recollection; and so to mingle these with the last ecstasies of life, as to give the dying man a foreboding of his transition to another state. On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a coffin without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to the departing one by lies which promise cure, or words which proffer consolation; the bier is represented as a scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted into the ears which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead of letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever deeper, though fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of good in him, that he recalls the slightest joy which he has shared with a dying person, far rather than a thousand greater pleasures given to a person in health; perhaps because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and redouble our attentions,--so little do mortals reflect that every pleasure they give or they receive may be the last. Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more painful than our entrance into it, were it not that our good mother Nature had previously mitigated its sufferings, by gently bearing her children from one world into another when they are already heavy with sleep. For in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of indifference toward the survivors to freeze about the heart of the lamented one; and in the hour immediately preceding dissolution (as we learn from those who have recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor of many dying persons), the brain is, as it were, inundated and watered by faint eddies of bliss, comparable to nothing upon earth better than to the ineffable sensations felt by a patient under magnetic treatment. We can by no means know how high these sensations of dying may reach, as we have accounts of them from none but those in whom the process has been interrupted; nor can we ascertain whether it is not these ecstatical transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions of pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state in some unknown heaven.