he volume that I never had in my
hand but once. I mention this in no spirit of boasting. Far from it; for,
on the contrary, amongst my mortifications have been compliments to my
memory, when, in fact, any compliment that I had merited was due to the
higher faculty of an electric aptitude for seizing analogies, and by means
of those aerial pontoons passing over like lightning from one topic to
another. Still it is a fact, that this pertinacious life of memory for
things that simply touch the ear without touching the consciousness, does
in fact beset me. Said but once, said but softly, not marked at all, words
revive before me in darkness and solitude; and they arrange themselves
gradually into sentences, but through an effort sometimes of a distressing
kind, to which I am in a manner forced to become a party. This being so,
it was no great instance of that power--that three separate passages in
the funeral service, all of which but one had escaped my notice at the
time, and even that one as to the part I am going to mention, but all of
which must have struck on my ear, restored themselves perfectly when I was
lying awake in bed; and though struck by their beauty, I was also incensed
by what seemed to be the harsh sentiment expressed in two of these
passages. I will cite all the three in an abbreviated form, both for my
immediate purpose, and for the indirect purpose of giving to those
unacquainted with the English funeral service some specimen of its beauty.

The first passage was this, "Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God, of
his great mercy, to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here
departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground, earth to earth,
ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection
to eternal life." * * *

I pause to remark that a sublime effect arises at this point through a
sudden rapturous interpolation from the Apocalypse, which, according to
the rubric, "shall be said or sung;" but always let it be sung, and by the
full choir:--

"I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, from henceforth
blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit; for
they rest from their labours."

The second passage, almost immediately succeeding to this awful burst of
heavenly trumpets, and the one which more particularly offended me, though
otherwise even then, in my seventh year, I could not but be touched by its
beauty, was this:--"Almighty Go