as the procession shall have passed beyond the circle of this
present world. But we do not classify for eternity.

And next, let the trumpet pour forth a funereal wail, and the herald's
voice give breath in one vast cry to all the groans and grievous
utterances that are audible throughout the earth. We appeal now to the
sacred bond of sorrow, and summon the great multitude who labor under
similar afflictions to take their places in the march.

How many a heart that would have been insensible to any other call has
responded to the doleful accents of that voice! It has gone far and
wide, and high and low, and left scarcely a mortal roof unvisited.
Indeed, the principle is only too universal for our purpose, and,
unless we limit it, will quite break up our classification of mankind,
and convert the whole procession into a funeral train. We will
therefore be at some pains to discriminate. Here comes a lonely rich
man: he has built a noble fabric for his dwelling-house, with a front
of stately architecture and marble floors and doors of precious woods;
the whole structure is as beautiful as a dream and as substantial as
the native rock. But the visionary shapes of a long posterity, for
whose home this mansion was intended, have faded into nothingness since
the death of the founder's only son. The rich man gives a glance at his
sable garb in one of the splendid mirrors of his drawing-room, and
descending a flight of lofty steps instinctively offers his arm to
yonder poverty stricken widow in the rusty black bonnet, and with a
check apron over her patched gown. The sailor boy, who was her sole
earthly stay, was washed overboard in a late tempest. This couple from
the palace and the almshouse are but the types of thousands more who
represent the dark tragedy of life and seldom quarrel for the upper
parts. Grief is such a leveller, with its own dignity and its own
humility, that the noble and the peasant, the beggar and the monarch,
will waive their pretensions to external rank without the officiousness
of interference on our part. If pride--the influence of the world's
false distinctions--remain in the heart, then sorrow lacks the
earnestness which makes it holy and reverend. It loses its reality and
becomes a miserable shadow. On this ground we have an opportunity to
assign over multitudes who would willingly claim places here to other
parts of the procession. If the mourner have anything dearer than his
grief he must seek h