ing and powerful, that there could be no motions of the life of
love; and infinitely less could we have any wish to be remembered after
we had passed away from a world in which each man had moved about like a
shadow.--If, then, in a creature endowed with the faculties of foresight
and reason, the social affections could not have unfolded themselves
uncountenanced by the faith that Man is an immortal being; and if,
consequently, neither could the individual dying have had a desire to
survive in the remembrance of his fellows, nor on their side could they
have felt a wish to preserve for future times vestiges of the departed;
it follows, as a final inference, that without the belief in
immortality, wherein these several desires originate, neither monuments
nor epitaphs, in affectionate or laudatory commemoration of the
deceased, could have existed in the world.

Simonides, it is related, upon landing in a strange country, found the
corpse of an unknown person lying by the sea-side; he buried it, and was
honoured throughout Greece for the piety of that act. Another ancient
Philosopher, chancing to fix his eyes upon a dead body, regarded the
same with slight, if not with contempt; saying, 'See the shell of the
flown bird!' But it is not to be supposed that the moral and
tender-hearted Simonides was incapable of the lofty movements of
thought, to which that other Sage gave way at the moment while his soul
was intent only upon the indestructible being; nor, on the other hand,
that he, in whose sight a lifeless human body was of no more value than
the worthless shell from which the living fowl had departed, would not,
in a different mood of mind, have been affected by those earthly
considerations which had incited the philosophic Poet to the performance
of that pious duty. And with regard to this latter we may be assured
that, if he had been destitute of the capability of communing with the
more exalted thoughts that appertain to human nature, he would have
cared no more for the corpse of the stranger than for the dead body of a
seal or porpoise which might have been cast up by the waves. We respect
the corporeal frame of Man, not merely because it is the habitation of a
rational, but of an immortal Soul. Each of these Sages was in sympathy
with the best feelings of our nature; feelings which, though they seem
opposite to each other, have another and a finer connection than that of
contrast.--It is a connection formed through t