that bodily darkness and mournfulness,
which at times came over him. Any one who knows "what a piece of work is
man;" how composite, how varying, how inconsistent human nature is, that
each of us are

"Some several men, all in an hour,"

--will not need to be told to expect, or how to harmonize these
differences of mood. You see this in that wonderful man, the apostle
Paul, the true typical fulness, the _humanness_, so to speak, of whose
nature comes out in such expressions of opposites as these--"By honor
and dishonor, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet
true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as
chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor,
yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things."

I cannot, and after your impressive and exact history of his last days,
I need not say anything of the close of those long years of suffering,
active and passive, and that slow ebbing of life; the body, without help
or hope, feeling its doom steadily though slowly drawing on; the mind
mourning for its suffering friend, companion, and servant; mourning
also, sometimes, that it must be "unclothed," and take its flight all
alone into the infinite unknown; dying daily, not in the heat of fever,
or in the insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, but having the
mind calm and clear, and the body conscious of its own decay,--dying, as
it were, in cold blood. One thing I must add. That morning when you were
obliged to leave, and when "cold obstruction's apathy" had already begun
its reign--when he knew us, and that was all, and when he followed us
with his dying and loving eyes, but could not speak--the end came; and
then, as through life, his will asserted itself supreme in death. With
that love of order and decency which was a law of his life, he
deliberately composed himself, placing his body at rest, as if setting
his house in order before leaving it, and then closed his eyes and
mouth, so that his last look--the look his body carried to the grave and
faced dissolution in--was that of sweet, dignified self-possession.

I have made this letter much too long, and have said many things in it I
never intended saying, and omitted much I had hoped to be able to say.
But I must end.

Yours ever affectionately,

J. BROWN.

"_MYSTIFI