which may perchance turn out to have a deeper interest for us than all those various questions, public and private, put together, with which we are daily agitating ourselves. I have alluded, in an earlier part of this work, to the belief entertained by the ancients that the souls of men, on being disengaged from the bodies, passed into a middle state, called Hades, in which their portions seemed to be neither that of complete happiness nor of insupportable misery. They retained their personality, their human form, their memory of the past, and their interest in those that had been dear to them on earth. Communications were occasionally made by the dead to the living: they mourned over their duties neglected and their errors committed; many of their mortal feelings, passions, and propensities, seemed to survive; and they sometimes sought to repair, through the instrumentality of the living, the injuries they had formerly inflicted. In short, death was merely a transition from one condition of life to another; but in this latter state, although we do not see them condemned to undergo any torments, we perceive that they are not happy. There are, indeed, compartments in this dark region: there is Tartarus for the wicked, and the Elysian fields for the good, but they are comparatively thinly peopled. It is in the mid-region that these pale shades abound, consistently with the fact that here on earth, moral as well as intellectual mediocrity is the rule, and extremes of good or evil the exceptions. With regard to the opinion entertained of a future state by the Hebrews, the Old Testament gives us very little information; but what glimpses we do obtain of it appear to exhibit notions analogous to those of the heathen nations, inasmuch as that the personality and the form seem to be retained, and the possibility of these departed spirits revisiting the earth and holding commune with the living is admitted. The request of the rich man, also, that Lazarus might be sent to warn his brethren, yet alive, of his own miserable condition, testifies to the existence of these opinions; and it is worthy of remark that the favor is denied, not because its performance is impossible, but because the mission would be unavailing—a prediction which, it appears to me, time has singularly justified.