e severed far and wide,
By mount, and stream, and sea;"

and these graves all tell a tale of buried hopes, buried love, buried
peace.

"The same fond mother bent at night
O'er each fair sleeping brow;
She had each folded flower in sight:
Where are those dreamers now!"

We can but sigh our sadness in the closing lines of this beautiful
poem--

"Alas, for love! if thou wert all;
And naught beyond, O earth!"

Thus do Inspiration and Poetry alike paint the sombre realities of
life and death; and point to death as the doom of life.

But I do not love to dwell upon these sad scenes, and will turn your
attention at once to a birth that knows no death, to a flower that
never fades, to a beauty that knows no decay. And can this be true?
Can it be that there is a deathless life, a fadeless flower, a
shadowless beauty? It may be that some of you are skeptical about
things like these. You may have the unbelief that held the heart of
Aaron Burr's daughter against all comfort, when she saw her son die.
In her agony of despair she cried out: "Omnipotence itself can never
restore to me what I have lost in my only boy."

Your faces may be turned the wrong way. You may be like Lot's wife,
_looking back_. And one might just as well talk to a pillar of salt
about the glory, and the beauty, and the bliss of the eternal state
of the righteous after death, as to talk to men whose backs are
heavenward and their faces earthward. You have no eyes in the back
part of your heads. Your ears are set to hear what is said to your
face, and to catch the sounds that meet you in front. You must turn
yourselves round. And more than all this, you must open the eyes of
your understandings that the light may shine in, and take the wads of
earthly wax out of your ears that you may hear the Savior's words of
"_spirit_ and _life_," and loose the strings of your hearts that the
_good_ and _truth_ of God's Word may enter. If you will do this I will
show you wonderful things. I will show you a fountain from which, if
you drink, you will never thirst again. Not like the fabled "Fountain
of Youth," which many sought, but never found. The fountain I mean has
been found by millions of the human race. It has quenched their thirst
forever.

Do not, I beseech you, understand me to mean that _one_ drink of its
water is sufficient to do this. No! no! But I do mean that after you
have come to the spring and taken _one_ drink it is your pri