om
cities and solitudes, and from beyond seas and oceans, from brethren who
never saw our face, and never may see it, we owe a debt of everlasting
gratitude; and life itself must leave our heart, that beats not now as
it used to beat, but with dismal trepidation, before it forget, or cease
to remember as clearly as now it hears them, every one of the many words
that came sweetly and solemnly to us from the Great and Good. Joy and
sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by sympathy with them,
we acknowledge our brotherhood with all our kind. We do far more. The
strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which
another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is
lightened, while those who at the time are not called to bear, are yet
willing to involve themselves in the sorrow of a brother. So soothed by
such sympathy may a poor mortal be, that the wretch almost upbraids
himself for transient gleams of gladness, as if he were false to the
sorrow which he sighs to think he ought to have cherished more sacredly
within his miserable heart.

One word embraces all these pages of ours--Memorials. Friends are lost
to us by removal--for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten.
But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a
moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the
friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his
smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting
change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but
his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few
syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may
have read together, "when life itself was new," and poetry overflowed
the whole world; or a lock of _her_ hair in whose eyes we first knew the
meaning of the word "depth." And if death hath stretched out the absence
into the dim arms of eternity--and removed the distance away into that
bourne from which no traveller returns--the absence and the distance of
her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore--what heart may abide
the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our
sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a
blessing and a farewell!

Why so sad a word--_Farewell_? We should not weep in wishing welfare,
nor sully felicity with tears. But we do weep because evil lies lu