but also it made it deeper. For here lay the sting of
it, viz. in the fatal words--"We shall be _changed_." How was the unity of
my interest in her to be preserved, if she were to be altered, and no
longer to reflect in her sweet countenance the traces that were sculptured
on my heart? Let a magician ask any woman whether she will permit him to
improve her child, to raise it even from deformity to perfect beauty, if
that must be done at the cost of its identity, and there is no loving
mother but would reject his proposal with horror. Or, to take a case that
has actually happened, if a mother were robbed of her child at two years
old by gipsies, and the same child were restored to her at twenty, a fine
young man, but divided by a sleep as it were of death from all
remembrances that could restore the broken links of their once-tender
connexion, would she not feel her grief unhealed, and her heart defrauded?
Undoubtedly she would. All of us ask not of God for a better thing than
that we have lost; we ask for the same, even with its faults and its
frailties. It is true that the sorrowing person will also be changed
eventually, but that must be by death. And a prospect so remote as that,
and so alien from our present nature, cannot console us in an affliction
which is not remote but present--which is not spiritual but human.

Lastly came the magnificent service which the English church performs at
the side of the grave. There is exposed once again and for the last time,
the coffin. All eyes survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the
day of departure from earth--records how useless! and dropped into
darkness as if messages addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes
the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the heart with volleying
discharges, peal after peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin
is lowered into its home; it has disappeared from the eye. The sacristan
stands ready with his shovel of earth and stones. The priest's voice is
heard once more--_earth to earth_, and the dread rattle ascends from the
lid of the coffin; _ashes to ashes_, and again the killing sound is
heard; _dust to dust_, and the farewell volley announces that the
grave--the coffin--the face are sealed up for ever and ever.

* * * * *

Oh, grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it
is, that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds.
Thou shakest