All earthly comforts vanish thus; So little hold of them have we, That we from them, or they from us, May in a moment ravished be. Yet we are neither just nor wise, If present mercies we despise; Or mind not how there may be made A thankful use of what we had. WITHER. There is a book written in Latin by the Flemish Jesuit Sarasa, upon the Art of rejoicing always in obedience to the Apostle's precept,—‘_Ars semper gaudendi, demonstrata ex solâ consideratione Divinæ Providentiæ._’ Leibnitz and Wolf have commended it; and a French Protestant minister abridged it under the better title of _L'Art de se tranquiliser dans tous les evenemens de la vie_. “I remember,” says Cowper, “reading many years ago, a long treatise on the subject of consolation, written in French; the author's name I have forgotten; but I wrote these words in the margin,—‘special consolation!’ at least for a Frenchman, who is a creature the most easily comforted of any in the world!” It is not likely that this should have been the book which Leibnitz praised; nor would Cowper have thus condemned one which recommends the mourner to seek for comfort, where alone it is to be found, in resignation to God's will, and in the prospect of the life to come. The remedy is infallible for those, who, like Mr. Bacon, faithfully pursue the course that the only true philosophy prescribes. At first, indeed, he had felt like the bereaved maiden in Schiller's tragedy, and could almost have prayed like her, for a speedy deliverance,— Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer, Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunsche nichts mehr. Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück! Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück, Ich habe gelebt und geliebet. But even at first the sense of parental duty withheld him from such a prayer. The grief, though “fine, full, perfect,” was not a grief that violenteth in a sense as strong As that which causeth it.[1] [Footnote 1: SHAKESPEARE.] There was this to compress, as it were, and perhaps to mitigate it, that it was wholly confined to himself, not multiplied among others, and reflected from them. In great public calamities when fortunes are wrecked in revolutionary storms, or families thinned or swept off by pestilence, there may be too many who look upon it as _Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris;_[2] and this is not so much because —fellowship in woe doth woe assuage,[3] and that —the mind much sufferance doth oerskip When grief hath mates and bearing fellowship[3]