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15. I knew that her hopes were but a mockery. A moment more, and a convulsive quiver passed over the lips of the dying boy; a slight shudder ran through his frame; and all was still. The girl knew, as if intuitively, that her brother was dead. She sat in tearless silence, but I saw that the waters of bitterness were gathering fearfully at their fountain. At last she raised her hands with a sudden effort, and pressing them upon her forehead, wept with the uncontrollable agony of despair.

16. On the next day, the corpse of the dead boy was committed to the waves. The little girl knew that it must be so, but she strove to drive the thought away, as if it had been an unreal and terrible vision. When the appointed hour was at hand, she came and begged me, with a tone that seemed less like a human voice than the low cadence of a disembodied and melancholy spirit, to go and look upon her brother, and see if he was indeed dead.

17. I could not resist her entreaties, but went with her to gaze upon the sleeping dust, to which all the tendrils of her life seemed bound. She paused by the bedside, and I almost deemed that her very existence would pass off in that long, fixed gaze. She moved not; she spoke not; till the form she loved was taken away to be let down into the ocean.

18. Then indeed she arose, and followed her lifeless brother with a calmness that might have been from heaven. The body sunk slowly and solemnly beneath the waves; a few long, bright ringlets streamed out upon the waters, a single white and beautiful glimpse came up through the glancing billows, and all that had once been joy and beauty vanished forever.

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19. During the short residue of our voyage, the bereaved sister seemed fading away, and beautiful as a cloud in a summer zenith. Her heart had lost its communion with nature, and she would look down into the sea, and murmur incoherently of its cold and solitary depths, and call her brother's name, and then weep herself into calmness.

a Intuitively; without the intervention of argument or consideration. b Ze'nith; the point directly over head in the heavens.

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20. Soon afterward, I left her with her friends. I know not whether she is a blossom of the earth, or whether she has long since gone to be nurtured in a holier realm. the memory of that beautiful and stricken one. ness, her innocence, and her deep and holy feelings, still come back to me in their glory and quietude, like a rainbow, or a summer cloud, that has showered and passed off forever.

LESSON LXI.

THE BURIAL.

1. It was summer. The sun shone proudly down upon the gray mist that rose above the billows; the blushing charms of spring were passed, and the summer glow of loveliness had succeeded. The woodlands were gay and beautiful; for Nature had clothed them in all her surpassing splendors. The mountain stream now ran, now rippled, now curled with its silver eddies, glad, sparkling in the sunbeam; now smoothly flowed along its ever-varying bed, toward its quiet home" in the world of waters."

2. The birds warbled as sweetly in their green bowers of bliss, as if sighs and tears were things unknown. There was joy on earth; the twittering swallow, as it darted along in sunshine and shade, heeded not the bitter wailing of affliction and distress; the wild bird, in its noiseless flight, softly as falls the snow-flake, seemed unmindful of woe, as it flashed its wing across the vision, like a thought of a dream during the hushed hours of midnight, and vanished as suddenly.

3. To me the sight of their joyous felicity brought no gladness; the sounds of their mirth fell cold upon the heart; it seemed but bitter mockery, and spoke of days departed. The bright and laughing skies seemed insensible that they were smiling over ruin and decay; that one of hope's fairest,

"The world of waters;" the ocean.

sweetest flowers had drooped and died; and that now, even now, it was to be laid in the earth's cold bosom.

4. I had seen the child in its guileless beauty, when it was a thing all glowing with health, innocence, and joy. I had seen it folded in the arms of her who bore it, in all the overwhelming fondness of a mother's love. But now her firstborn blessing, her first, last, and only one, slept; not on the soft bosom of a mother's tenderness, but with the quiet dead! Death! death! how lovely thou canst be!

5. Though pale and lifeless, it wore a smile passionless and pure as the cherub of immortality; it had nothing of the corpse about it but its whiteness, nothing of the grave but its silence. So beautiful it seemed, like a sportive lamb, decked with a flowery garland for the sacrifice, I could fain have lain down by its side in the cold bosom of our common mother, in the dark and silent valley.

6. Thou weepest, childless mother. Ah! well thou mayest. The Son of God wept at the tomb of his friend; and thou mournest thy first-born. Hard is it for thee to lay thy loved one in the damp earth, beneath the cold clods of the valley; hard it is to reflect that this, thy child of peerless beauty, will never more raise its rosy lips to thine, in all the fondness of childhood's warm affection. Ah! there are recollections that

weigh upon the soul even to overpowering.

7. Memory tells thee thou art desolate. It tells, too, of playful smiles, of a thousand soft and winning ways that twine around the mother's heart; it tells of the sweetest wild throbbings of unspeakable bliss that were thine, which softly soothed it to slumber and repose. Now the foliage of the cypress will be its shelter, and the narrow house its abiding place; the nursery will no more resound with its gladsome mirth; the cradle in which it had so often reposed in quiet is now desolate. Thou weepest, childless mother!

8. The time is come when she may gaze once more upon her sleeping boy, ere the pall is settled upon his lifeless brow. O the bitter agony of that moment. One long, agonizing kiss upon his marble forehead, and he is shut from her view.

The long train of weeping friends gathered around a fresh dug grave. The coffin was lowered into its final resting. place, in the vale of solitude and silence. The spirit of him who was so lovely here had, long ere this, crossed the dark waters, and is safely landed upon the flowery coast of a world of fadeless bloom!

LESSON LXII.

SORROW FOR THE DEAD.

IRVING.

[The reader may note the emphatic words which are repeated in the following piece, and tell how such words should be read. See Rule 3, for Emphasis, p. 19.]

1. THE Sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open; this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

2. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness?

3. No; the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved is softened away into pensive medita

tion on all that it was in the days of its loveliness, who would root out such a sorrow from the heart.

4. Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gayety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure or the burst of revelry? No; there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remein. brance of the dead to which we turn even from the charins of the living.

5. O, the grave! the grave! It buries every error, covers every defect, extinguishes every resentment. From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look upon the grave even of an enemy,` and not feel a compunctious throb that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies moldering before him?

6. But the grave of those we loved, what a place for meditation! There it is that we call up in long review the whole history of virtue and gentleness, and the thousand endearments lavished upon us almost unheeded in the daily intercourse of intimacy. There it is that we dwell upon the tenderness, the solemn, awful tenderness of the parting scene.

7. The bed of death, with alkits stifled griefs, its noiseless attendants, its mute, watchful assiduities! The last testimonies of expiring love, the feeble, fluttering, thrilling, O, how thrilling pressure of the hand. The last fond look of the glazing eye, turning upon us even from the threshold of existence. The faint, faltering accents struggling in death to give one more assurance of affection.

8. Ay, go to the grave of buried love, and meditate! There settle the account with thy conscience for every past benefit unrequited, every past endearment unregarded, of that departed being who can never never return to be soothed by thy contrition!

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9. If thou art a child, and hast ever added a sorrow to the soul, or a furrow to the silver brow of an affectionate parent; if thou art a husband, and hast ever caused the fond bosom

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