One monument in a church not far from Golden End always brings tears to my eyes; there is a chapel in the aisle, the mausoleum of an ancient family, where mouldering banners and pennons hang in the gloom; in the centre of the chapel is an altar-tomb, on which lies the figure of a young boy, thirteen years old, the inscription says. He reclines on one arm, he has a delicately carved linen shirt that leaves the slender neck free, and he is wrapped in a loose gown; he looks upward toward the east, his long hair falling over his shoulders, his thin and shapely hand upon his knee. On each side of the tomb, kneeling on marble cushions on the ledge, are his father and mother, an earl and countess. The mother, in the stately costume of a bygone court, with hair carefully draped, watches the face of the child with a look in which love seems to have cast out grief. The earl in armour, a strongly-built, soldier-like figure, looks across the boy’s knee at his wife’s face, but in his expression—I know not if it be art—there seems to be a look of rebellious sorrow, of thwarted pride. All his wealth and state could not keep his darling with him, and he does not seem to understand. There have they knelt, the little group, for over two centuries, waiting and watching, and one is glad to think that they know now whatever there is to know. Outside the golden afternoon slants across the headstones, and the birds twitter in the ivy, while a full stream winds below through the meadows that once were theirs. Such a contemplation does not withdraw one from life or tend to give a false view of its energies; it does not forbid one to act, to love, to live; it only gilds with a solemn radiance the cloud that overshadows us all, the darkness of the inevitable end. Face to face with the _lacrimæ rerum_ in so simple and tender a form, the heavy words _Memento Mori_ fall upon the heart not as a sad and harsh interruption of wordly dreams and fancies, but as a deep pedal note upon a sweet organ, giving strength and fulness and balance to the dying away of the last grave and gentle chord. 31 If any one whose eye may fall upon these pages be absolutely equable of temperament, serene, contented, the same one day as another, as Dr. Johnson said of Reynolds, let him not read this chapter—he will think it a mere cry in the dark, better smothered in the bed-clothes, an unmanly piece of morbid pathology, a secret and sordid disease better undivulged, on which all persons of proper pride should hold their peace.