r happiness, and leave some not
dishonorable memorial of ourselves for their regard, when we shall sleep
with the fathers, we protract our own earthly being, and seem to crowd
whatever is future, as well as all that is past, into the narrow compass
of our earthly existence. As it is not a vain and false, but an exalted
and religious imagination, which leads us to raise our thoughts from the
orb, which, amidst this universe of worlds, the Creator has given us to
inhabit, and to send them with something of the feeling which nature
prompts, and teaches to be proper among children of the same Eternal
Parent, to the contemplation of the myriads of fellow-beings with which
his goodness has peopled the infinite of space; so neither is it false
or vain to consider ourselves as interested and connected with our whole
race, through all time; allied to our ancestors; allied to our
posterity; closely compacted on all sides with others; ourselves being
but links in the great chain of being, which begins with the origin of
our race, runs onward through its successive generations, binding
together the past, the present, and the future, and terminating at last,
with the consummation of all things earthly, at the throne of God.

There may be, and there often is, indeed, a regard for ancestry, which
nourishes only a weak pride; as there is also a care for posterity,
which only disguises an habitual avarice, or hides the workings of a low
and grovelling vanity. But there is also a moral and philosophical
respect for our ancestors, which elevates the character and improves the
heart. Next to the sense of religious duty and moral feeling, I hardly
know what should bear with stronger obligation on a liberal and
enlightened mind, than a consciousness of alliance with excellence which
is departed; and a consciousness, too, that in its acts and conduct, and
even in its sentiments and thoughts, it may be actively operating on the
happiness of those who come after it. Poetry is found to have few
stronger conceptions, by which it would affect or overwhelm the mind,
than those in which it presents the moving and speaking image of the
departed dead to the senses of the living. This belongs to poetry, only
because it is congenial to our nature. Poetry is, in this respect, but
the handmaid of true philosophy and morality; it deals with us as human
beings, naturally reverencing those whose visible connection with this
state of existence is severed, and