us. Here, at all events, we have had a sympathizing audience, pitying nature's common cares till they forget their own; for here were absent

"The barbarous proud, whose passions would immure

In their own little hearts the joys of life,

(Unsocial things!) for their repast alone.”

At the Lover's Seat this lesson will be felt to the heart's core, while dictating such homely lines as those of the old poet

"Nature of reason thus much doth importune,

Man should partake in grief with man's misfortune."

CHAPTER XV.

THERE you are, thinking again! says one of the friends, putting on an arch frown as she steals behind the other to slap him on the shoulder, having left him alone in the bower for a moment while she ran after a butterfly. Well, perhaps his countenance did warrant the raillery; for how many coming things are always casting their shadows before to throw a shade even over lovers' meetings! But not to speak of what is personal to them, which does not concern the reader, the stage at which we are arrived in this little inquiry itself would furnish an instance; for, in relation to virtue, it remains that we consider a still more grave matter of daily occurrence than the last belonging to the category of those things of which we are considering the excellence; for, as the queen says to Hamlet,

"Thou know'st, 'tis common; all that live must die,
Passing through nature to eternity."

'Ay, madam," he replies, "it is common."

At the Lover's Seat not alone the sufferings of humanity, but the solemn images of death itself, are apt to find hearts to which at brief moments they will spontaneously suggest themselves; for grave and unpoetic declaimers, with thoughts often

fixed, by the way, on other things all the while, have not the monopoly of such considerations, as they often would apparently wish us to suppose, while looking with scornful pity on those whom the soft stars wink at, and treating as profane those who, under a lighter and certainly a more agreeable form of humanity, think of quite as many matters as they do, only that they make no boast of them, even while "talking of lovely things that conquer death." The thought that all must die comes into our happiest hours, and, as a poet says,

So on a popular page, intended for perusal by the youth of both sexes, we find occasionally hints like the following:

"Take thee a lesson, lady fair,

Take it from things that are sweet and rare,

I would not open a formal book

Of reverend saws, but would bid thee look
On all that is bright and fair to see;
Only such lessons were fit for thee.

Take thee a lesson, lady fair!

Look at the sun that laughs on high,
On clouds that float in the crystal sky,
Look at the grass in its simple dress,
Look at the rose in her loveliness;
The sun will sink, the clouds will fly,
The grass must wither, the rose must die.
Take thee a lesson, lady fair!

Then take thee a lesson, lady fair,

When thy fortunes the brightness of summer wear;
Think of the sun, and the clouds, and the grass,
And the rose-how sweetly all fair things pass;
Trust not so fondly, woe may befall:

For chance and change is the lot of all.

Take thee a lesson, lady fair!"

Festus, conversing with Helen, is more stern still :

There is no mote of death in thine eye's beams,
To hint of dust, or darkness, or decay.
No: immortality sits mirrored there,
Like a fair face long looking on itself;

Yet thou shalt lie in death's angelic garb,

As in a dream of dress, my beautiful!

The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,

And feast him on the heart men pined to death for."

But, remembering who are our audience, it seems unkind to let our thoughts discourse in this wise long. Let us try to look at the bright side of what is presented to our notice here.

It is superfluous to dwell on such a truism as the mother of Hamlet utters. Every one knows that death is one of the common things with which we are constantly surrounded.

"Yes, she is gone: and we are going all;

Like flowers we wither and like leaves we fall."

The point for us to consider is the virtue and excellence elicited by this common thing; which investigation we must conduct in a very cursory manner, merely, in fact, casting a glance at the subject to which necessity, arising out of the plan of our inquiry rather than choice perhaps, directs our notice.

Death as a common thing, in spite of what many transcendentalists inhumanly affirm, has a very close relationship to virtue. Let us not mind what they proclaim about unworthy motives and the mere force of circumstances: the fact that stares every one in the face is that its approach develops virtues, draws out a goodness that we never thought existed in the heart; that it makes the rough gentle, the thoughtless contemplative, the unruly docile as a child, the boisterous affectionate, the careless anxious to make all the world virtuous, to forgive enemies, to be reconciled to every one, and to breathe only love; that it makes the gay religious; that it makes, as is often humorously said, the devil himself a saint,-though this is very falsely if literally affirmed, for this we may believe it would never do. But why deny its power over our poor frail human common nature? We might go on to show that it develops virtue in those who witness it, making them thoughtful, considerate, kind, long-suffering, and charitable. But this must suffice. Let us

observe, besides, whether death is not often blamed for evils that do not essentially belong to it.

It is one of the advantages of accustoming ourselves to study the beautiful and the good in common things, that we grow fortified by means of such reflections against many apprehensions and troubles that perhaps would otherwise have assailed us; and of this we have an instance in the present turn of our thoughts; for if we look steadily and calmly at the last scene of this drama in which we are all actors of one kind or other, though it be only to play the part of the street boys that are hired for the night to figure in a pantomime, we shall find that what the philosopher styled the most terrible of all terrible things has in reality much excellence in it and much good that every one of us can understand.

In the first place, if death be common, the Shakspearian question is most natural, "Why seems it so particular with thee? Come! is it not unmanly grief to lament following the road that all the beautiful and good have taken before us, and that all whom we love and admire will have to take shortly after us? For shame! away with such sickly lamentations!" "If nearly twenty years ago," says Cicero, addressing the senate, "I denied in this very temple that death could be premature to one who had been consul, how much more truly shall I deny that it can be so now to an old man? To me, conscript fathers, death is a thing to be wished for, having accomplished what I undertook." If we have ever loved and found a heart responsive to our own, what more should we gain by living longer? We may not, like the Roman orator, have obtained consulships and emerged from the sweet obscurity of a common station; but we have been granted the best thing that life can offer; and death, let it come when it will, can never seem for us as premature. But, you say, the thought of what may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, the dread of something after death, may render it particular in our regard, and ourselves exceptions at the prospect of it. To this a short, and it seems an obvious answer may be given, without, I hope, incurring the crime of intentional presumption. Either, then, it will be compatible with infinite goodness and mercy to admit us into the regions of eternal felicity, or it will not. If the

former, it is of course a consummation devoutly and really to be wished, and death must be excellent for those who suffer it; if the latter, how can we reconcile our reason, our imagination, or our hearts, to such an act of the will as that of desiring what would be incompatible with the exercise of those adorable qualities which include all that lovers love and sigh for on earth?— or how can we think it possible to pass a better sentence than that which has been promulgated after these qualities have been employed in hearing, weighing, and determining every thing? What is any man that he should form an obstacle to the plans of infinite, eternal love?—of that Love which created us for loving and being loved, even for flying at times to this very Seat, and inhaling the fragrance of the air that bathes it in the light of heaven? It is one of the peculiarities of this spot, that it takes all selfishness out of man and woman; that it infuses into us an expansive spirit of good will, identifying our inmost thoughts and wishes with that which is at the bottom of the soul of nature,—namely, love. The Ego, the me, looks very small and contemptible here; it vanishes in the presence of a girl. How should it be thought for a moment worthy of interfering with the scheme of eternal benevolence providing for the safety of her and of us all, for the welfare of human society, by diminishing the number of betrayers and of those who would otherwise act basely; providing for the diffusion of goodness, for the restraint of crime, for the rewards of disinterested, sympathetic, self-devoted virtue ?

For those who in this life have transgressed against love, and mercy, and all their cohort, often far greater than we fancy it to be, the excellence of death will consist in its darkest attributes; and who that rest at the Lover's Seat would imagine that it could be otherwise? He who has never sympathized with men or women, whose heart, like that of an antichrist, has been closed to humanity, closed to little children, closed to the innocent, closed to the Magdalen, closed to the fallen, closed to the prodigal son, closed to the virtuous, closed to sinners, and to all whose intellectual state was represented by the blind, and the deaf, and the dumb; who had no affection for friends, no forgiveness for enemies, no sacrifice for any, no loyalty for all,-in whose mind love was unknown, mercy