d looked forward to a futurity too dreadful to think upon--when
memory should call up many a sunny hour of existence, the loss of
friends, the triumph of exertion, and then fall back upon the dread
consciousness of the ever-buried life the grave closed over; and then I
thought that perhaps sense but lingered round the lifeless clay, as the
spirits of the dead are said to hover around the places and homes they
have loved in life ere they leave them for ever, and that soon the lamp
should expire upon the shrine when the temple that sheltered it
lay mouldering and in ruins. Alas! how fearful to dream of even the
happiness of the past, in that cold grave where the worm only is a
reveller! to think that though

"Friends, brothers, and sisters are laid side by side,
Yet none have ere questioned, nor none have replied;"

yet that all felt in their cold and mouldering hearts the loves and
affections of life, budding and blossoming as though the stem was
not rotting to corruption that bore them. I brought to mind the awful
punishment of the despot who chained the living to the dead man, and
thought it mercy when compared to this.

'How long I lay thus I know not, but the dreary silence of the chamber
was again broken, and I found that some of my dearest friends were come
to take a farewell look at me ere the coffin was closed upon me for
ever. Again the horror of my state struck me with all its forcible
reality, and like a meteor there shot through my heart the bitterness
of years of misery condensed into the space of a minute. And then I
remembered how gradual is death, and how by degrees it creeps over every
portion of the frame, like the track of the destroyer, blighting as it
goes, and said to my heart, All may yet be still within me, and the mind
as lifeless as the body it dwelt in. Yet these feelings partook of life
in all their strength and vigour; there was the will to move, to speak,
to see, to live, and yet all was torpid and inactive, as though it had
never lived. Was it that the nerves, from some depressing cause,
had ceased to transmit the influence of the brain? Had these winged
messengers of the mind refused their office? And then I recalled the
almost miraculous efficacy of the will, exerted under circumstances of
great exigency, and with a concentration of power that some men only are
capable of. I had heard of the Indian father who suckled his child at
his own bosom, when he had laid its mother in