s, I remark, in the first place, that the dead speak to
us, and commune with us, through the works which they have left behind
them. As the islands of the sea are the built-up casements of myriads
of departed lives,--as the earth itself is a great catacomb,--so we who
live and move upon its surface inherit the productions and enjoy the
fruits of the dead. They have bequeathed to us by far the larger portion
of all that influences our thoughts, or mingles with the circumstances
of our daily life. We walk through the streets they laid out. We inhabit
the houses they built. We practise the customs they established. We
gather wisdom from books they wrote. We pluck the ripe clusters of their
experience. We boast in their achievements. And by these they speak to
us. Every device and influence they have left behind tells their story,
and is a voice of the dead. We feel this more impressively when we enter
the customary place of one recently departed, and look around upon his
work. The half-finished labor, the utensils hastily thrown aside,
the material that exercised his care and received his last touch, all
express him, and seem alive with his presence. By them, though dead, he
speaketh to us, with a freshness and tone like his words of yesterday.
How touching are those sketched forms, those unfilled outlines in
that picture which employed so fully the time and genius of the
great artist--Belshazzar's feast! In the incomplete process, the
transition-state of an idea from its conception to its realization, we
are brought closer to the mind of the artist; we detect its springs
and hidden workings, and therefore feel its reality more than in
the finished effort. And this is one reason why we are impressed at
beholding the work just left than in gazing upon one that has been for
a long time abandoned. Having had actual communion with the contriving
mind, we recognize its presence more readily in its production; or else
the recency of the departure heightens the expressiveness with which
everything speaks of the departed. The dead child's cast-off garment,
the toy just tossed aside, startles us as though with his renewed
presence. A year hence, they will suggest him to us, but with a
different effect.

But though not with such an impressive tone, yet just as much, in fact,
do the productions of those long gone speak to us. Their minds are
expressed there, and a living voice can do little more. Nay, we are
admitted to a more intima