It is as natural to die as to be born; and to little child, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other. He that dies in an earnest pursuit, is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt and therefore, a mind fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the dolours of death. But, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is "Nunc dimittis," when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath this also-that it openeth the gate of fame, and extinguisheth envy.

DEATH-& Divine Dispensation.

Bacon.

DEATH-Equality in.

Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes. The ashes of an oak in a chimney are no epitaph of that, to tell me how high, or how large, that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless too; it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not look apon, will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of the churchyard into the church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the church into the churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, "This is the patrician, this is the noble flower, and this the yeoman, this the plebeian bran?" Donne.

DEATH-Film before.

There is before the eyes of men, on the brink of dissolution, a glassy film, which death appears to impart, that they may have a brief prospect of eternity, when some behold the angels of light, while others have the demons of darkness before them. Cockton. DEATH-of Friends.

Friend after friend departs;

Who hath not lost a friend? There is no union here of hearts,

That finds not here an end: Were this frail world our only rest, Living or dying, none were blest.

Beyond the flight of time,

Beyond this vale of death,
There surely is some blessèd clime
Where life is not a breath,

Nor life's affections transient fire,
Whose sparks fly upward and expire.
There is a world above,

Where parting is unknown;
A whole eternity of love,

Form'd for the good alone;
And Faith beholds the dying here
Translated to that glorious sphere.
Thus star by star declines,

Till all are pass'd away,
As morning high and higher shines
To pure and perfect day;
Nor sink those stars in empty night,
They lose themselves in heaven's own light.
James Montgomery.

DEATH,

DEATH-Happiness after.

She is gone! No longer shrinking from the winter wind, or lifting her calm pure forehead to the summer's kiss; no longer gazing with | her blue and glorious eyes into a far-off sky; no longer yearning with a holy heart for heaven; no longer toiling painfully along the path, upward and upward, to the everlasting rock on which are based the walls of the city of the Most High; no longer here; she is there; gazing, seeing, knowing, loving, as the blessed only see, and know, and love.

Earth has one angel less, and heaven one more, since yesterday. Already, kneeling at the throne, she has received her welcome, and is resting on the bosom of her Saviour. If human love have power to penetrate the veil (and hath it not?), then there are yet living here a few who have the blessedness of knowing that an angel loves them.

DEATH-a quiet Haven.

Hawthorn.

What is death

To him who meets it with an upright heart?
A quiet haven, where his shatter'd bark
Harbours secure, till the rough storm is past.
Perhaps a passage, overhung with clouds
But at its entrance; a few leagues beyond
Opening to kinder skies and milder suns,
And seas pacific as the soul that seeks them.
Hurdis.
DEATH-Indifference to.

Men in general do not live as if they looked to die; and therefore do not die as if they looked to live. Manton.

DEATH-Inexorability of.

Death, thou art he that will not flatter princes,
That stoops not to authority, nor gives
A specious name to tyranny; but shows
Our actions in their own deformèd likeness.

Shakspeare.

Oh! just and mighty Death! What none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world have flattered, thou alone hast cast out of the world, and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow word, Hic jacet. Raleigh.

Leaves have their time to fall,

And flowers to wither at the north wind's breath,

And stars to set; but all

Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death! 'Mrs. Hemans.

DEATH.

DEATH-Crushing Influence of
It is hard

To feel the hand of death arrest one's steps,
Throw a chill blight o'er all one's budding
hopes,
And hurl one's soul untimely to the shades,
Lost in the gaping gulf of blank oblivion.
Kirke White.
DEATH-Joy of.

My joy is death!
Death, at whose name I oft have been afear'd,
Because I wish'd this world's eternity!
Shakspeare.

DEATH-the great Liberator.

Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman's task into another man's hand.

Sterne.

Saw thee when loveliest, and his icy touch
Preserves thy look for ever. It is well:
The only things that change not are the dead.
Now thou art safe from Time's defacing hand,
From staling custom, and, sadder far than all,
From human fickleness. In after-years,

It might be-I would scarce have follow'd thee

A mourner to the grave. Thou art so fair,
That, gazing on thee, clamorous grief becomes,
For very reverence, mute. If mighty Death
Made our rude human faces by his touch
Divinely fair as thine, O never more
Would strong hearts break o'er biers. There
sleeps to-night

A sacred sweetness on thy silent lips,
A solemn light upon thy ample brow,
That I can never, never hope to find
Upon a living face.
DEATH-Lowliness of.

Smith.

be! how unlike all he was! how extreme to all he is! I bend over thee, and mark thy wasted, pallid frame:-I look up, and there is ascending above me an angel's form! I stoop to thee, and just can catch thy feeble, gasping whisper-I listen, and there floats around me a seraph's song! I take thy hand, tremulous and cold-it is waving to me from yonder skies! I wipe thy brow, damp and furrowed:-it is enwreathed with the garland of victory! I slake thy lip, bloodless and parched :-it is drinking the living fountains, the overflowing springs of heaven!

Dr. Richard Winter Hamilton.

DEATH-Mysteries beyond.

Dear, beauteous Death, the jewel of the just,
Shining no where but in the dark,
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark!

He that hath found some fledged bird's nest may know

At first sight if the bird be flown;

But what fair field or grove he sings in now-
That is to him unknown.

And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our
wonted themes,
And into glory peep.

DEATH-Mystery of.

Henry Vaughan.

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers),

And mark'd the mild angelic aír,
The rapture of repose that's there,
The fix'd yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek,
And, but for that sad shrouded eye,
That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now;
And but for that still changeless brow,
Where cold obstruction's apathy
Appals the gazing mourner's heart
As if to him it could impart
The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon.
Yes, but for these, and these alone,
Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd,
The first, last look by death reveal'd!

What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret instinct of decaying nature, or the soul's impulsive throb, it rested in the heart-a calm, sweet, prophetic as immortality draws on? Be it what it may, certainty that heaven was near; calm as the light of sunset, sweet as the bright stillness of autumn. There her little heart reposed, only troubled by sorrow for those who loved her so dearly. Mrs. Stowe.

The first symptom of approaching death with some is the strong presentiment that they are about to die.

Ozanam, the mathematician, while in apparent health, rejected pupils, from the feeling that he was on the eve of resting from his labours; and he expired soon after, of an apopletic stroke.

Fletcher, the divine, had a dream which shadowed out his impending dissolution, and believing it to be the merciful warning of

DEATH.

Heaven, he sent for a sculptor and ordered his tomb. "Begin your work forthwith," he said, at parting; there is no time to lose.' And unless the artist had obeyed the admonition, death would have proved the quicker workman of the two.

Mozart wrote his Requiem under the conviction that the monument he was raising to his genius, would, by the power of association, prove a universal monument to his remains. When life was fleeting very fast, he called for the score, and musing over it, said, "Did I not tell you truly that it was for myself that I composed this death-chant?"

Another great artist, in a different depart ment, convinced that his hand was about to lose its cunning, chose a subject emblematical of the coming event. His friends inquired the nature of his next design, and Hogarth replied, "The end of all things." "In that case," rejoined one, "there will be an end of the painter." What was uttered in jest was answered in earnest, with a solemn look and a heavy sigh: "There will," he said; "and the sooner my work is done the better." He commenced next day, laboured upon it with unremitting diligence, and when he had given it the last touch, seized his pallet, broke it in pieces, and said: "I have finished." The print was published in March, under the title of "Finis ;" and in October the curious eyes which saw the manners in the face, were closed in the dust. Our ancestors, who were prone to look in the air for causes which were to be found upon the earth, attributed these intimations to various supernatural agencies.

John Hunter has solved the mystery, if mystery it can be called, in a single sentence. "We sometimes," he says, "feel within our selves that we shall not live; for the living powers become weak, and the nerves communicate the intelligence to the brain."

His own case has often been quoted among the marvels of which he offered this rational explanation. He intimated, on leaving home, that if a discussion which awaited him at the hospital took an angry turn, it would prove his death. A colleague gave him the lie; the coarse word verified the prophecy, and he expired almost immediately in an adjoining room. There was everything to lament in the circumstance, but nothing at which to wonder, except that any individual could show such disrespect to the great genius, a single year of whose existence was worth the united lives of his opponents. Hunter, in uttering the prediction, had only to take counsel in his own experience, without the intervention of invisible spirits. He had long laboured under a disease of the heart, and he felt the disorder had

DEATH.

reached the point at which any sharp agitation would bring on the crisis.

Circumstances, which at another time would excite no attention, are accepted for an omen when health is failing. The order for the requiem with Mozart, the dream with Fletcher, turned the current of their thoughts to the grave.

Foote, prior to his departure for the continent, stood contemplating the picture of a brother author, and exclaimed, his eyes full of tears, "Poor Weston !" In the same dejected tone he added, after a pause: "Soon others shall say, 'Poor Foote !" and, to the surprise of his friends, a few days proved the justice of his prognostication. The expectation of the event had a share in producing it; for a slight shock completes the destruction of prostrate energies.

The

The case of Wolsey was singular. morning before he died he asked Cavendish the hour, and was answered "Past eight." "Eight of the clock!" replied Wolsey, "that cannot be;-eight of the clock, nay, nay, it cannot be eight of the clock, for by eight of the clock shall you lose your master." The day he miscalculated, the hour came true. On the following morning, as the clock struck eight, his troubled spirit passed from life. Cavendish and the bystanders thought he must have had a revelation of the time of his death; and from the way in which the fact had taken possession of his mind, we suspect that he relied on astrological prediction, which had the credit of a revelation in his own esteem.

Persons in health have died from the expectation of dying. It was once common for those who perished by violence to summon their destroyers to appear, within a stated time, before the tribunal of their God: and we have many perfectly attested instances in which, through fear and remorse, the perpetrators withered under the curse, and died. Pestilence does not kill with the rapidity of terror.

The profligate abbess of a convent, the Princess Gonzaga of Cleves, and Guize, the profligate Archbishop of Rheims, took it into their heads, for a jest, to visit one of the nuns by | night, and exhort her as a person who was visibly dying. While in the performance of their heartless scheme they whispered to each | other, “She is just departing," she departed in earnest. Her vigour, instead of detecting the trick, sank beneath the alarm; and the profane pair discovered, in the midst of their sport, that they were making merry with a corpse. DEATH-Preparations for.

Wakley.

No one can fear death less than I do, neither am I much attached to life; but I have never