he
faculties of foresight and reason, the social affections could not
have unfolded themselves uncountenanced by the faith that Man is an
immortal being; and if, consequently, neither could the individual
dying have had a desire to survive in the remembrance of his fellows,
nor on their side could they have felt a wish to preserve for future
times vestiges of the departed; it follows, as a final inference, that
without the belief in Immortality, wherein these several desires
originate, neither monuments nor epitaphs, in affectionate or
laudatory commemoration of the Deceased, could have existed in the
world.

Simonides, it is related, upon landing in a strange Country, found the
Corse of an unknown person, lying by the Sea-side; he buried it, and
was honoured throughout Greece for the piety of that Act. Another
ancient Philosopher, chancing to fix his eyes upon a dead Body,
regarded the same with slight, if not with contempt; saying, "see the
Shell of the flown Bird!" But it is not to be supposed that the moral
and tender-hearted Simonides was incapable of the lofty movements of
thought, to which that other Sage gave way at the moment while his
soul was intent only upon the indestructible being; nor, on the other
hand, that he, in whose sight a lifeless human Body was of no more
value than the worthless Shell from which the living fowl had
departed, would not, in a different mood of mind, have been affected
by those earthly considerations which had incited the philosophic Poet
to the performance of that pious duty. And with regard to this latter
we may be assured that, if he had been destitute of the capability of
communing with the more exalted thoughts that appertain to human
Nature, he would have cared no more for the Corse of the Stranger than
for the dead body of a Seal or Porpoise which might have been cast up
by the Waves. We respect the corporeal frame of Man, not merely
because it is the habitation of a rational, but of an immortal Soul.
Each of these Sages was in Sympathy with the best feelings of our
Nature; feelings which, though they seem opposite to each other, have
another and a finer connection than that of contrast.--It is a
connection formed through the subtle progress by which, both in the
natural and the moral world, qualities pass insensibly into their
contraries, and things revolve upon each other. As, in sailing upon
the orb of this Planet, a voyage towards the regions where the sun
sets, conduc