ppalling, and
inevitable. Like him, I brought the presence of death too vividly before
them; like him, I was connected with the infliction of a doom I had no
power to avert. Men withheld from me their affection, refused me their
sympathy, as if I were not like themselves. My very mortality seemed less
obvious to their imaginations when contrasted with the hundreds for whom
my hand prepared the last narrow dwelling-house, which was to shroud for
ever their altered faces from sorrowful eyes. Where _I_ came, _there_ came
heaviness of heart, mournfulness, and weeping. Laughter was hushed at my
approach; conversation ceased; darkness and silence fell around my
steps--the darkness and the silence of _death_. Gradually I became awake
to my situation. I no longer attempted to hold free converse with my
fellow men. I suffered the gloom of their hearts to overshadow mine. My
step crept slowly and stealthily into their dwellings; my voice lowered
itself to sadness and monotony; I pressed no hand in token of
companionship; no hand pressed mine, except when wrung with agony, some
wretch, whose burden was more than he could bear restrained me for a few
moments of maddened and convulsive grief, from putting the last finishing
stroke to my work, and held me back to gaze yet again on features which I
was about to cover from his sight. It is well that God, in his
unsearchable wisdom, hath made death loathsome to us. It is well that an
undefined and instinctive shrinking within us, makes what we have loved
for long years, in a few hours

"That lifeless thing, the living fear."

It is well that the soul hath scarcely quitted the body ere the work of
corruption is begun. For if, even thus, mortality clings to the remnants
of mortality, with 'love stronger than death;' if, as I have seen it, warm
and living lips are pressed to features where the gradually sinking eye
and hollow cheek speak horribly of departed life; what would it be if the
winged soul left its tenement of clay, to be resolved only into a marble
death; to remain cold, beautiful, and imperishable; every day to greet our
eyes; every night to be watered with our tears? The bonds which hold men
together would be broken; the future would lose its interest in our minds;
we should remain sinfully mourning the idols of departed love, whose
presence forbade oblivion of their loveliness; and a thin and scattered
population would wander through the world as through the valley of the