are stretched dead in the clouds! Yonder lies the wrecked moon, an unsphered mass, dark and blackened. The blue vault of heaven falls in with a concluding crash, and Creation is a dark and silent ruin!! “Mournful as it is, it is sweet and soothing to be enabled once more to shed tears as I sit upon the tombs of Fanny and Agnes. To come before sunrise, while the dew is yet weeping upon their graves, and I put aside the long grass as if it were the hair that shaded their temples, their lids, and watch till the blue flowers lift up as if they were the eyes of those I loved; and then wish them good morrow, and talk to them, and call them my dearest Fanny and my ling Agnes. Sweeter still, as the breeze gently bends them towards me, to feel the branches of these plants playing about my neck, as if the dear departed were stretching up their arms from beneath the earth to embrace me. But sweetest of all, to kiss these opening rose-buds, as if they were the lips of those into whose dar grave they shoot their roots, and to catch their perfumed breath, as it thus wafts me up a voice of consolation from the tomb "Hark! do you not hear the last words more faintly repeated in the distant sky? And now again they are wafted to mine ear, as from the innermost depths of heaven- Far, far away! And now their echoes float in soft whispers through the firmament, until they slowly melt into silence. Those soothing, those delicious echoes may die upon the air, but they shall often spring up again, and live in my memory. This grave is now my chosen place of refuge -of refuge from myself and my own solitary thoughts; for a companionship with the dead is preferable to utter loneliness. With rough stones, and fragments of the rock, I have built up a little pyramid over their remains, to which I have affixed a board and an inscription. 3 "Thou tearless, Islel which no burial-placeT Has sadden'd since time had birth, Receive the first of the human race That ever were laid in thy earth. ted bak "Now may'st thou pity our mortal doom; -nity For thy grass has with tear's been ret, And thy boneless soil now contains a tomb bodeg edt, 721 992 ada reznot on qu "Thou hast tasted death: they are mould'ring both In their beauty's prime and pride, -Like a rose cut off in its early growth, With its lovely bud by its side, b" Thou hast seen man's lot, but thou hast not seen His pride and his pomp of death; at For thy velvet turf was the pall of green 91 That cover'd the pair beneath. "There were none to chant their funeral dirge, And no passing bell was rung; But their knell was the roar of the distant surge, And the winds their requiem sung. 9: Their banners and plumes these flow'rs supplied, That over them sadly wave; On the arms in whose fond embrace they died E 1 Were they hearsed to their lonely grave d "But what can their funeral pomp exalt? 870% This stately Isle is their tomb Be botese And over them spreads the azure vault w Which the heavenly lamps illume. borstat bus They are dead but we are not far apart;TM » "Alone, alone, alone! The last hope is extinguished and my fit comes on again, I can bear up no longer the silence torments my ear, the solitude grinds down my very soul; my head is stunned with grief, my heart is full of bitterness. I must die! I will dig a grave for myself beside that of my wife and daughter, and tear up the trap door that leads from life to death, and pass the horizon that divides time from eternity, and leap down into the invisible world that I may know its unutterable secrets, and escape from the intolerable misery of earthly existence. "I was hastening to the hermitage to procure tools for the purpose of digging my own grave, when upon a turfy knoll where I had often sat to overlook the little lake, I beheld a figure, seated and apparently gazing upon the waters. It was the figure of myself! The grotesque and tattered garments, the wrapt melancholy air, the flowing beard-I could not be mis taken, it was no other than myself! Instinc tively I stood still and put down my hand to feel for my beard, and I could feel nothing. I passed it backwards and forwards through my body, still keeping at a distance from the figure before me, and it encountered nothing, moving unimpeded through vacant impalpable air. I retained consciousness, and yet I was clearly a disembodied spirit: but oh! what a different consciousness; a sudden sensation of lightness, of an indescribably delicious joy, of an ethereal ecstasy, seemed to impart to me all the freshness and elasticity of a new ex istence. I was at once electrified with rap turous feelings and beatific thoughts, as if I were all over sensations, and every delectable; and yet all over spiritual and intelligential, and every thought bliss. I was rapt in Elysium—in a paradisaical entrancement. It seemed as if mere volition would carry me up into the air if I wished it, and I looked down upon my shoulders to see whether they were furnished with wings, but I could sensation |