As Harriet, bolder than her friend, or affecting to be so, reached forward, to remove the brier from the more lovely plant, in hopes that the rude and thorny veil might conceal other flowers, it yielded to her grasp, and revealed a hollow or sunken place in the ground, at one extremity of which was a rude stone, entirely shapeless and undressed, yet so placed as to mark undeniably the couch of some human clod of the valley. No name, letter, or device of any kind,--no inscription to record the virtues of the dead, no legend to perpetuate the grief of the living,--appeared on the rude monument; and, indeed, however expressive the shape and appearance of the hollow place to those already aware that a grave had been dug in this unsanctified nook, it is scarce probable that a stranger, stumbling upon it by chance, could have believed that in that coarse and dishonoured fragment, his foot pressed upon a funeral stone. It was a singular grave--it was a singular cemetery; and the maidens regarded the brambled pit and the solitary flower with awe, the one because her spirit was especially susceptible of impressions from melancholy objects, and the other because the legend of her companion had invested the place with an interest personal, it might be said, to herself. How little reflection is expended upon,--yet how much is called for, by the grave,--by the lowliest hillock that is piled over the icy bosom, by the grassiest hollow that has sunk with the mouldering bones of a fellow creature! And in this narrow haven rots the bark that has ploughed the surges of the great vital ocean! in this little den, that the thistle can overshadow in a day's growth, and the molewarp undermine in an hour of labour, is crushed the spirit that could enthrall a world, and dare even a contest with destiny! How little it speaks for the value of the existence, which man endures so many evils to prolong; how much it reduces the significance of both the pomp and wretchedness of being, reducing all its vicissitudes into the indistinguishable identity which infinite distance gives to the stars,--a point without parallax, a speck, an atom! Such is life,--the gasp of a child that inspires the air of existence but once,--a single breath breathed from eternity. But the destiny that comes behind us,--oblivion! It is not enough that we moralize upon the equality of the sepulchre; that the rich man, whose soul is in the ostentation of a marble palace, and his heart in the splendour of the feast, should consider how small a pit must content him, or that the proud, who boast their 'pre-eminence above the beasts,' should know that the shaggy carcass and the lawn-shrouded corse must fatten the earth together. We should teach our vanity the lesson of humiliation that is afforded by the grave; neglecting the mighty mausoleums of those marvellous spirits which fame has rendered immortal, we should turn to the nameless tombs of the million, and in