What moral purpose is answered in thus thrusting the thought of their dissolution upon the poor and miserable, amid their labors and wants? Is not life hard enough for them to bear, burthened with hunger and no food, with ignorant vice--habitual and early inculcated vice--which, in their view, is almost virtue, and certainly, is second nature? Must they turn horror-struck from the neglect, even to the remains of the poor beings who, like themselves, are not freed by death from the selfish contempt of their fellows? Why must the bell send forth those tones that seem to the sick and weak nerves of the feeble like a summons from the grave? Why this sickening array in musty black, this dressing up a banquet for the worm, with terrific ceremonies? Death is less awful to all, on account of the departure from life, than because of the black badges, the dark and gloomy retinue, that are associated in our minds with the event of it. When we think of dying, it is of being put in a coffin, the white shroud setting off, in loathsome contrast, the yellow palor of the face, and the indescribable expression of the human features without a soul; and then comes the black carriage, and that decaying pall, which has served so many like occasions, and which will itself, though with the sexton it looks as if it had a terrestrial immortality, finally perish, and be cast aside to rot, but with no ostentatious funeral. The motion, too, of this procession is slow; and our torture is felt as lingering and fated. At last, we rest in the dark earth--we are lonely and out of hearing--pinioned for ever! It would seem that human ingenuity had contrived a tissue of horrors to close the troubles of a human life. Death is serious business, to be sure, and our passage through its shadows is a fearful journey. Yet it is an entrance to immortality. The entrance to magnificent temples, and brilliant theatres, is through dark portals--necessarily dark to be firm; and nothing human can add to the solemnity of death; but we may, by our sympathetic attempts at the terrible-sublime, change what is solemn and salutary into a source of disgust and aversion. We come into a world of care, and want, and affliction, and our unconscious ears are struck with sounds of rejoicing. We enter upon an immortality of bliss, and around the self-same body there are wailing and lamentation. I was perplexing myself for a solution of this strange inconsistency in our customs, when chancing to meet a philosophic friend, he relieved my perplexity, by saying: 'Oh, people are afraid of going to hell, and that their friends are gone there, and so they make all this sad array. They usher their relations into eternity--for the soul in our associations ever accompanies the body--as criminals are led to execution. Their awful fate thus finds an awful language.'