ch spirits, never touched with the
down or dust of human attributes, descend and ascend on their
missions to the earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly
these beautiful faiths? To say, this hope may go up, but this must
go down to the darkness of annihilation! Was it irreverent in the
pious singing-master of a New England village, when he said, that
often, while returning home late on bright winter nights, he had
dropped the reins upon his horse's neck, and sung Old Hundred from
the stars, set as notes to that holy tune, when they first sang
together in the morning of the creation? What spiritual good or
Christian end would be gained, to break up the charm and cheer of
this his belief? Or to dispel that other confidence, which so
helped him to bear earth's trials, that one day he should join all
the spirits of the just made perfect, and all the high angels in
heaven, and, on the plane of that golden gamut, they should sing
together their hymns of joy and praise, in that same, good, old
tune, from those same star-notes, which a thousand centuries should
not deflect nor transpose from their first order within those
everlasting staves and bars!

If the spirit's faith be allowed such wide confidences as these; if
it may carry up into the invisible and infinite so many precious
relics from the wreck of time, so many human circumstances and
associations, why may it not take with it, to hang up in its heaven,
photographs of those earthly localities rendered immortal here by
the lives of good and great men? Such a life is a sun, and it casts
a disk of light upon the very earth on which it shines; not that
flashy circle which the lens of the microscope casts upon the
opposite wall, to show how scarcely visible mites may be magnified;
but a soft and steady illumination that does not dim under the
beating storms and bleaching dews of centuries, but grows brighter
and brighter, as if the seed-rays that made it first multiplied
themselves from year to year. The earth becomes more and more
thickly dotted with these permanent disks of light, and each is
visited by pilgrims, who go and stand with reverence and admiration
within the cheering circle. Shakespeare's thought-life threw out a
brilliant illumination, of wide circumference, at Stratford-upon-
Avon, and no locality in England bears a biograph more venerated
than the birth-place of the great poet. His thought-life was a sun
that will never set as long as this