on shore; but the wheels, as they began their
revolutions, threw a dash of spray over me so cold--so deadly cold,
with the chill that will never leave those waters until Death be
drowned in his own river--that with a shiver and a heartquake I awoke.
Thank Heaven it was a Dream!

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE

Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession. All of us
have our places, and are to move onward under the direction of the
Chief Marshal. The grand difficulty results from the invariably
mistaken principles on which the deputy marshals seek to arrange this
immense concourse of people, so much more numerous than those that
train their interminable length through streets and highways in times
of political excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far beyond the memory
of man or even the record of history, and has hitherto been very little
modified by the innate sense of something wrong, and the dim perception
of better methods, that have disquieted all the ages through which the
procession has taken its march. Its members are classified by the
merest external circumstances, and thus are more certain to be thrown
out of their true positions than if no principle of arrangement were
attempted. In one part of the procession we see men of landed estate or
moneyed capital gravely keeping each other company, for the
preposterous reason that they chance to have a similar standing in the
tax-gatherer's book. Trades and professions march together with
scarcely a more real bond of union. In this manner, it cannot be
denied, people are disentangled from the mass and separated into
various classes according to certain apparent relations; all have some
artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn
to consider as a genuine characteristic. Fixing our attention on such
outside shows of similarity or difference, we lose sight of those
realities by which nature, fortune, fate, or Providence has constituted
for every man a brotherhood, wherein it is one great office of human
wisdom to classify him. When the mind has once accustomed itself to a
proper arrangement of the Procession of Life, or a true classification
of society, even though merely speculative, there is thenceforth a
satisfaction which pretty well suffices for itself without the aid of
any actual reformation in the order of march.

For instance, assuming to myself the power of marshalling the aforesaid
procession, I direct a trumpeter to