deep-damasked wings"
beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers, as he flutters in the
ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown summer glories.

No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium, where the
desire to live and that to depart just balance each other. If one has a
house, which he has lived and always means to live in, he pleases himself
with the thought of all the conveniences it offers him, and thinks little
of its wants and imperfections. But once having made up his mind to move
to a better, every incommodity starts out upon him, until the very
ground-plan of it seems to have changed in his mind, and his thoughts and
affections, each one of them packing up its little bundle of
circumstances, have quitted their several chambers and nooks and migrated
to the new home, long before its apartments are ready to receive their
coming tenant. It is so with the body. Most persons have died before
they expire,--died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is
only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted
mansion. The fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of
dying persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its
airy angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first cry,
is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness the last
period of life. Almost always there is a preparation made by Nature for
unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there is for the removal
of a milktooth. The roots which hold human life to earth are absorbed
before it is lifted from its place. Some of the dying are weary and want
rest, the idea of which is almost inseparable in the universal mind from
death. Some are in pain, and want to be rid of it, even though the
anodyne be dropped, as in the legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel.
Some are stupid, mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without
long tossing about. And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as
they draw near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the
caravan moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send
word along the file that water is in sight. Though each little party
that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to
which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it
been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed which
recognized a future, that tho