The voices of the dead come to us from their works, from their results and these are all around us. But I remark, in the second place, that the dead speak to us in memory and association. If their voices may be constantly heard in their works, we do not always heed them; neither have we that care and attachment for the great congregation of the departed which will at any time call them up vividly before us. But in that congregation there are those whom we have known intimately and fondly, whom we cherished with our best love, who lay close to our bosoms. And these speak to us in a more private and peculiar manner,--in mementos that flash upon us the whole person of the departed, every physical and spiritual lineament--in consecrated hours of recollection that upon up all the train of the past, and re-twine its broken ties around our hearts, and make its endearments present still. Then, then, though dead, they speak to us. It needs not the vocal utterance, nor the living presence, but the mood that transforms the scene and the hour supplies these. That face that has slept so long in the grave, now bending upon us, pale and silent, but affectionate still,--that more vivid recollection of every feature, tone, and movement, that brings before us the departed just as we knew them in the full flush of life and health,--that soft and consecrating spell which falls upon us, drawing in all our thoughts from the present, arresting, as it were, the current of our being, and turning it back and holding it still as the flood of actual life rushes by us,--while in that trance of soul the beings of the past are shadowed--old friends, old days, old scenes recur, familiar looks beam close upon us, familiar words reecho in our ears, and we are closed up and absorbed with the by-gone, until tears dissolve the film from our eyes, and some shock of the actual wakes us from our reverie;--all these, I say make the dead to commune with us as really as though in bodily form they should come out from the chambers of their mysterious silence, and speak to us. And if life consists in experiences, and not mere physical relations,--and if love and communion belong to that experience, though they take place in meditation, or in dreams, or by actual contact,--then, in that hour of remembrance, have we really lived with the departed, and the departed have come back and lived with us. Though dead, they have spoken to us. And though memory sometimes induces the spirit of heaviness,--though it is often the agent of conscience, and wakens u to chastise,--yet, it is wonderful how, from events that were deeply mingled with pain, it will extract an element of sweetness. A writer, in relating one of the experiences of her sick-room, has illustrated this. In an hour of suffering, when no one was near here, she went out from her bed and her room to another apartment, and looked out upon a glorious landscape of sunrise and spring-time. "I was suffering too much to enjoy this picture