perhaps with contempt!--heedless of the swift flight of time, which shrouded him imperceptibly in darkness, until he was warned by the guardian of the dead that it was time to depart--and to depart _alone_! No inscription recorded the "one loved name;" he would not expose it to the unfeeling gaze of the heartless tourist: all he would willingly have traced upon her tomb, would have been "Here lies _my own_!" The mouldering earth, the fleshless skeleton over which he mourns, cannot obliterate the remembrance of what she was: though her eyes, perhaps, no longer exist, still their former languid, liquid look of bliss, beams freshly in his recollection. The lips which once pronounced the long wished-for avowal of mutual love are still moist and open to memory's embrace--still seem to lisp the delicious _tu_! Our language is rich, without comparison richer far than the French; but we have nothing so endearing, so bewitching, as their _tu-toiement_: our _thee's_ and _thou's_ are frigid, chilly, when compared to the _first toi_ that escapes inadvertently from beloved lips! A French writer has beautifully expressed this exquisite moment: "Le _premier tu_ est tout-puissant; c'est le _fiat lux_ de l'ame; il est sublime, il debrouille le chaos!" Sublime are the words, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord!" Would it be irreligious to say, "Happy are the dead who die beloved?" Their fond and ardent heart had never been chilled by the withering hand of infidelity and ingratitude. They died in an ecstatic dream of perfect bliss on earth, and never were awakened to the world's mocking realities!--they died when they felt and believed in their heart of hearts that they were dearly beloved--could not be loved more dearly: with that conviction, death, in a worldly acceptation, can never be untimely. Probably, they died still sufficiently animated by a latent, lingering spark of life, to press the hand that was so often linked in mutual pressure in happy days--to feel the burning tear of anguish drop on the pale cheek--to hear the sad, the awful, last word, _a Dieu!_--an expression that habit has rendered trivial, but which bears with it, in the tenderest solicitude, the most hallowed meaning; since, in pronouncing it, we leave all that we cherish under the protection and the safeguard of OUR GOD. Affection deprives death of all horrors. We shrink not from the remains of what we cherished. Despite its impiety, there was something refined in that conviction of the ancients, who imagined that in bestowing their farewell kiss they inhaled the souls of those they loved. How sweet are those lines of Macrobius, originally attributed to Plato! Dum semihulco suavio Meum pullum suavior, Dulcemque florem spiritus Duco ex aperto tramite, Animo tunc aegra et saucia Cucurrit ad labia mihi! Our Shakspeare has quaintly, yet beautifully, described this parting embrace: