hosoever believeth shall live, though
he die; who also taught us by his holy apostle St Paul not to be sorry, as
men without hope, for them that sleep in _him_; WE meekly beseech thee, O
Father! to raise us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness;
that, when we shall depart this life, we may rest in _him_ as our hope
is--that this our sister doth."

Ah, _that_ was beautiful; that was heavenly! We might be sorry, we had
leave to be sorry; only not without hope. And we were by hope to rest in
_Him_, as this our sister doth. And howsoever a man may think that he is
without hope, I, that have read the writing upon these great abysses of
grief, and viewed their shadows under the correction of mightier shadows
from deeper abysses since then, abysses of aboriginal fear and eldest
darkness, in which yet I believe that all hope had not absolutely died,
know that he is in a natural error. If, for a moment, I and so many
others, wallowing in the dust of affliction, could yet rise up suddenly
like the dry corpse[12] which stood upright in the glory of life when
touched by the bones of the prophet; if in those vast choral anthems,
heard by my childish ear, the voice of God wrapt itself as in a cloud of
music, saying--"Child, that sorrowest, I command thee to rise up and
ascend for a season into my heaven of heavens"--then it was plain that
despair, that the anguish of darkness, was not _essential_ to such sorrow,
but might come and go even as light comes and goes upon our troubled
earth.

Yes! the light may come and go; grief may wax and wane; grief may sink;
and grief again may rise, as in impassioned minds oftentimes it does, even
to the heaven of heavens; but there is a necessity--that, if too much left
to itself in solitude, finally it will descend into a depth from which
there is no re-ascent; into a disease which seems no disease; into a
languishing which, from its very sweetness, perplexes the mind and is
fancied to be very health. Witchcraft has seized upon you, nympholepsy has
struck you. Now you rave no more. You acquiesce; nay, you are passionately
delighted in your condition. Sweet becomes the grave, because you also
hope immediately to travel thither: luxurious is the separation, because
only perhaps for a few weeks shall it exist for you; and it will then
prove but the brief summer night that had retarded a little, by a
refinement of rapture, the heavenly dawn of reunion. Inevitable sometimes
it is in sol