I do not believe that "there is more or less of affectation in every death-bed scene." Young, rather, is right: "A death-bed's a detector of the heart. Here tired dissimulation drops her mask Through life's grimace, that mistress of the scene!" Father Faber says: "Every Christian death-bed is a world--a complete world--of graces, interferences, compensations, lights, struggles, victories, supernatural gestures, and the action of grand spiritual laws. Each death-bed, explained to us as God could explain it, would be in itself an entire science of God--a summa of the most delicate theology. The varieties of grace in the individual soul are so many infinities of the one infinite life of God. No two deaths are quite alike. The most delicate shades of difference between one death and another would probably disclose to us more of the ways of God, and more of the capabilities of the soul than philosophy has ever taught. Some deaths are so beautiful that they can hardly be recognizable for punishments. Such was the death of St. Joseph, with his head pillowed on the lap of Jesus. The twilight bosom of Abraham was but a dull place compared with the house of Nazareth which the eyes of Jesus lighted. Such was Mary's death, the penalty of which was rather in its delay. It was a soft extinction, through the noiseless flooding of her heart with divine love. As nightingales are said to have sung themselves to death, so Simeon died, not of the sweet weariness of his long watching, but of the fulness of his contentment, of the satisfaction of his desires, of the very new youth of soul which the touch of the Eternal Child had infused into his age, and, breaking forth into music which heaven itself might envy and could not surpass, he died with his world-soothing song upon his lips--a song so sunset-like that one might believe all the beauty of all earth's beautiful evenings since creation had gone into it to fill it full of peaceful spells. Age after age shall take up the strain. All the poetry of Christian weariness is in it. It gives a voice to the heavenly detachment and unworldliness of countless saints. It is the heart's evening light after the working hours of the day to millions and millions of believers. The very last compline that the church shall sing, before the midnight when the doom begins and the Lord breaks out upon the darkness from the refulgent east, shall overflow with the melodious sweetness of Simeon's pathetic song." Thus do our words--even dying words--go on vibrating for ever.