ilgrims after thine
earthly steps; pity us, help us, and after death bring us to thy
home.

To the sympathetic poet, the man of sentiment and meditation, who
views the question from the position of the heart, in the glory
and vistas of the imagination, but with all the known facts and
relations of the subject lying bare under his sight, the uniting
restoration, in another sphere, of earth's broken ties and parted
friends, is an unappeasable craving of the soul, in harmony with
the moral law, powerfully prophesied to his experience from all
quarters, and seemingly confirmed to his hopes by every promise of
God and nature.7

6 Grafe, Biblische Beitrage zu der Frage, Werden wir uns
wiedersehen nach dem Tode.

7 Engel, Wir werden uns wiedersehen. Halst, Beleuchtung der
Hauptgrunde fur den Glauben an Erinnerung und Wiedersehen nach dem
Tode. Streicher, Neue Beitrage zur Kritik des Glaubens an
Ruckerinnerung nach dem Tode.

Received as a truth, it is a well of inexhaustible comfort, making
experience a green oasis where it overflows. The denial of it as a
proven falsehood is a withering blast of dust blowing on the
friendly caravan of sojourners in the desert of life. If existence
is the enjoyment of a largess of social love, and death is to have
a solitary hand snatch it all away forever, how dismal is the
prospect to the poor heart that loves and clings, loses and
despairs, and can only falter hopelessly on! It cannot be so. Love
is the true prophet. Heaven will restore the treasures earth has
lost.

The mourner by the grave! Eve convulsed over the form of Abel!
Jesus weeping where Lazarus lay! America embracing the urn of
Washington! The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It is
the most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth the
pelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breast
in agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wings
above them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they were
brought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in history
to brood over the ashes of departed ages, dropping the tears of
her grief and faith into the future to restore her deceased
children to life and draw them together within her embrace. And
that sublime Rachel will not easily be comforted except when her
thoughts, migrating whither her offspring have gone, seem to find
them happy in some happy heaven.

The poet, lover of his race, who cannot trust his happier