for ever, and one day
will meet and be together in God's eternal present; and when the several
souls of an individual are in harmony no doubt He will perfect their
felicity by joining them with a tie that shall be incomparably more
tender and intimate than any earthly union ever dreamed of, constituting
a life one yet manifold--a harp of many strings, not struck successively
as here on earth, but blending in rich accord.

"And now I beg you not to suppose that what I have tried to demonstrate
is any hasty or ill-considered fancy. It was, indeed, at first but a
dream with which the eyes of my sweet mistress inspired me, but from a
dream it has grown into a belief, and in these last months into a
conviction which I am sure nothing can shake. If you can share it the
long mourning of your life will be at an end. For my own part I could
never return to the old way of thinking without relapsing into
unutterable despair. To do so would be virtually to give up faith in any
immortality at all worth speaking of. For it is the long procession of
our past selves, each with its own peculiar charm and incommunicable
quality, slipping away from us as we pass on, and not the last self of
all whom the grave entraps, which constitutes our chief contribution to
mortality. What shall it avail for the grave to give up its handful if
there be no immortality for this great multitude? God would not mock us
thus. He has power not only over the grave, but over the viewless
sepulchre of the past, and not one of the souls to which he has ever
given life will be found wanting on the day when he makes up his jewels."

CHAPTER III.

To understand the impression which Paul's letter produced upon Miss
Ludington imagine, in the days before the resurrection of the dead was
preached, with what effect the convincing announcement of that doctrine
would have fallen on the ears of one who had devoted her life to hopeless
regrets over the ashes of a friend.

And yet at no time have men been wholly without belief in some form of
survival beyond the grave, and such a bereaved woman of antiquity would
merely have received a more clear and positive assurance of what she had
vaguely imagined before. But that there was any resurrection for her
former self--that the bright youth which she had so yearned after and
lamented could anywhere still exist, in a mode however shadowy, Miss
Ludington had never so much as dreamed.

There might be immortality for