wood were strewed all round; and a crowd of
people, with terrified eager faces, were gazing about in that vague love
of excitement which makes sights and places of catastrophes, to a
certain degree, delectable to human beings.

I cannot help thinking, dear Harriet, that this sad accident, sad enough
as I admit it to be for the relations and friends of the dead, was not
so particularly terrible as far as the individuals themselves were
concerned. God only knows how I may feel when I am struck, either in my
own life or that of any one I love; but hitherto death has not appeared
to me the awful calamity that people generally seem to consider it. The
purpose of life alone, time wherein to do God's will, makes it sacred. I
do not think it _pleasant_ enough to wish to keep it for a single
instant, without the idea of the _duty_ of living, since God has bid us
live. The only thought which makes me shrink from the notion of suicide
is the apprehension that to this life another _might_ succeed, as full
of storm, of strife, of disappointment, difficulty, and unrest as this;
and with that uncertainty overshadowing it, death has not much to
recommend it. It is poor Hamlet's "perchance" that is the knot of the
whole question, never here to be untied.

Involuntarily, we certainly hope for better things, for respite, for
rest, for enfranchisement from the thraldom of some of our passions and
affections, the goods and bonds that spur us through this life and
fasten us to it. We--perhaps I ought to say I--involuntarily connect the
idea of death with that of peace and repose; delivery, at any rate, from
some subjugation to sin, and from some subjection to "the ills we know"
(though it may be none of this), so that my first feeling about it is
generally that it is a happy rather than a deplorable event for the
principals concerned; but then comes the loss of the living, and I
perceive very well how my heart would bleed if those I love were taken
from me. I see my own desolation and agony in that case, but still feel
as if I could rejoice for them; for, after all, life is a heavy burden
on a weary way, and I never saw the human being whose existence was what
I should call happy. I have seen some whose lives were so _good_ that
they justified their own existence, and one could conceive both why
they lived and that they found it good to live.

Of course, this is instinctive feeling; reflection compels one to
acknowledge the infinite value