e verily believe that it would be too
much to expect that it ever can make amends for the hideous horrors of
this Easterly Haur. The Cut-throat!

On such days suicides rush to judgment. That sin is mysterious as
insanity--their graves are unintelligible as the cells in Bedlam. Oh!
the brain and the heart of man! Therein is the only Hell. Small these
regions in space, and of narrow room--but haunted may they be with all
the Fiends and all the Furies. A few nerves transmit to the soul despair
or bliss. At the touch of something--whence and wherefore sent, who can
say--something that serenes or troubles, soothes or jars--she soars up
into life and light, just as you may have seen a dove suddenly cleave
the sunshine--or down she dives into death and darkness, like a shot
eagle tumbling into the sea!

Materialism! Immaterialism! Why should mortals, whom conscience tells
that they are immortals, bewildered and bewildering ponder upon the
dust! Do your duty to God and man, and fear not that, when that dust
dies, the spirit that breathed by it will live for ever. Feels not that
spirit its immortality in each sacred thought? When did ever religious
soul fear annihilation? Or shudder to think that, having once known, it
could ever forget God? Such forgetfulness is in the idea of eternal
death. Therefore is eternal death impossible to us who can hold
communion with our Maker. Our knowledge of Him--dim and remote though it
be--is a God-given pledge that He will redeem us from the doom of the
grave.

Let us then, and all our friends, believe, with Coleridge, in his
beautiful poem of the "Nightingale," that

"In Nature there is nothing melancholy,"

not even November. The disease of the body may cause disease in the
soul; yet not the less trust we in the mercy of the merciful--not the
less strive we to keep feeding and trimming that spiritual lamp which is
within us, even when it flickers feebly in the dampy gloom, like an
earthly lamp left in a vaulted sepulchre, about to die among the dead.
Heaven seems to have placed a power in our Will as mighty as it is
mysterious. Call it not Liberty, lest you should wax proud; call it not
Necessity, lest you should despair. But turn from the oracles of
man--still dim even in their clearest responses--to the Oracles of God,
which are never dark; or if so, but

"Dark with excessive bright"

to eyes not constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all
your books, when you