always a grave and solemn thing, and it were well that a grave and solemn voice should announce its presence to the clustered or the scattered homes. But why change solemnity into despair? Why fill the air with nought but heavy gloom for a whole hour or half-hour? I would not say, in the words of Poe:-- “Avaunt! to-night my heart is light, no dirge will I upraise, But waft the angel on her flight with a pæan of old days! Let _no_ bell toll! lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, Should catch the note as it doth float up from the weeping earth.” For there _must_ be sadness here, if there be joy where the spirit has gone. Only let not the dark cloud be debarred from any the least silver lining. Something gentle, tender, and sweet, in accordance, so far as earth’s lamenting can accord, with the glory and rapture of the released one, would surely be better for the living than that slow prolonged numbering the beads of their own sorrow. _I_ would have the bells rung, as for a wedding; only with a minute’s interval between each note. So the joy and the sorrow would each claim its share. The early Christians used to speak of and commemorate the day of death, as “τὰ γενέθλια,” the birthday feast of the Dead. What a different way of putting things from our compassionate mention--not of the surviving, but of the dead. _Poor so-and-so! How sad!_--this, for the spirit, that we feel a good hope, is in Paradise! How the having it put before you in the just view--rather as an entering into true life, than a dying from it, casts a glow on what most seem to regard as nought but gloom. A most exquisite instance of such a beautiful putting of such a sharp Winter day to even a bereaved father and mother, I find in one of Archbishop Leighton’s heavenly letters. In what a different light must their loss, surely, have appeared to them, after its perusal. “Indeed,” he writes, “it was a sharp stroke of a pen, that told me your pretty Johnny was dead: and I felt it truly more than, to my remembrance, I did the death of any child in my lifetime. Sweet thing! and is he so quickly _laid to sleep? Happy he!_ Though we shall have no more the pleasure of his lisping and laughing, he shall have no more the pain of crying, nor of being sick, nor of dying: and hath wholly escaped the trouble of schooling, and all other sufferings of boys, and the riper and deeper griefs of riper years, this poor life being all along but a linked chain of many sorrows and many deaths. Tell my dear sister she is now much more akin to the other world; and this will quickly be passed to us all. _John is but gone an hour or two sooner to bed, as children use to do, and we are undressing to follow._” In another letter the same writer says of himself--