the daring imagination, the coldest heart, nay, to
philosophers themselves? As we hear it, we think God speaks; the vaulted
arches of no church are mere material; they have a voice, they tremble,
they scatter fear by the might of their echoes. We think we see
unnumbered dead arising and holding out their hands. It is no more a
father, a wife, a child,--humanity itself is rising from its dust.

It is impossible to judge of the catholic, apostolic, and Roman faith,
unless the soul has known that deepest grief of mourning for a loved one
lying beneath the pall; unless it has felt the emotions that fill the
heart, uttered by that Hymn of Despair, by those cries that crush the
mind, by that sacred fear augmenting strophe by strophe, ascending
heavenward, which terrifies, belittles, and elevates the soul, and
leaves within our minds, as the last sound ceases, a consciousness
of immortality. We have met and struggled with the vast idea of the
Infinite. After that, all is silent in the church. No word is said;
sceptics themselves _know not what they are feeling_. Spanish genius
alone was able to bring this untold majesty to untold griefs.

When the solemn ceremony was over, twelve men came from the six chapels
and stood around the coffin to hear the song of hope which the Church
intones for the Christian soul before the human form is buried. Then,
each man entered alone a mourning-coach; Jacquet and Monsieur Desmarets
took the thirteenth; the servants followed on foot. An hour later, they
were at the summit of that cemetery popularly called Pere-Lachaise. The
unknown twelve men stood in a circle round the grave, where the coffin
had been laid in presence of a crowd of loiterers gathered from all
parts of this public garden. After a few short prayers the priest threw
a handful of earth on the remains of this woman, and the grave-diggers,
having asked for their fee, made haste to fill the grave in order to dig
another.

Here this history seems to end; but perhaps it would be incomplete if,
after giving a rapid sketch of Parisian life, and following certain of
its capricious undulations, the effects of death were omitted. Death in
Paris is unlike death in any other capital; few persons know the trials
of true grief in its struggle with civilization, and the government of
Paris. Perhaps, also, Monsieur Jules and Ferragus XXIII. may have proved
sufficiently interesting to make a few words on their after life not
entirely out of pl