An anxious care now sinks the thorn
Still deeper in our bleeding heart.

This beautiful creation loses nothing by repetition. On the contrary,
the oftener one sees it in the LEDGER, the more grand and awe-inspiring
it seems.

With one more extract I will close:

Doble.--On the 4th inst., Samuel Pervil Worthington Doble, aged 4 days.

Our little Sammy's gone,
His tiny spirit's fled;
Our little boy we loved so dear
Lies sleeping with the dead.

A tear within a father's eye,
A mother's aching heart,
Can only tell the agony
How hard it is to part.

Could anything be more plaintive than that, without requiring further
concessions of grammar? Could anything be likely to do more toward
reconciling deceased to circumstances, and making him willing to go?
Perhaps not. The power of song can hardly be estimated. There is an
element about some poetry which is able to make even physical suffering
and death cheerful things to contemplate and consummations to be
desired. This element is present in the mortuary poetry of Philadelphia
degree of development.

The custom I have been treating of is one that should be adopted in all
the cities of the land.

It is said that once a man of small consequence died, and the Rev. T.
K. Beecher was asked to preach the funeral sermon--a man who abhors the
lauding of people, either dead or alive, except in dignified and simple
language, and then only for merits which they actually possessed or
possess, not merits which they merely ought to have possessed. The
friends of the deceased got up a stately funeral. They must have had
misgivings that the corpse might not be praised strongly enough, for
they prepared some manuscript headings and notes in which nothing was
left unsaid on that subject that a fervid imagination and an unabridged
dictionary could compile, and these they handed to the minister as he
entered the pulpit. They were merely intended as suggestions, and so the
friends were filled with consternation when the minister stood in the
pulpit and proceeded to read off the curious odds and ends in ghastly
detail and in a loud voice! And their consternation solidified to
petrification when he paused at the end, contemplated the multitude
reflectively, and then said, impressively:

"The man would be a fool who tried to add anything to that. Let us
pray!"

And with the same strict adhesion to truth it can be said that the