An inscription on a monumental tablet in the English burying-ground at Bourdeaux, thus speaks of the death sleep of the soul: "There was a sweet and nameless grace That wandered o'er her lovely face; Yet never, never slumber'd there A mind more pure, a form more fair!" Some verses entitled "The forsaken hearth," conclude thus, with a similar idea : "They may all return—but the light will be dead In the cottage hearth which their father fed; In death's sad silent abode." Thousands read such intimations of the state of departed souls, without noticing the false views they give, or their evil tendency, and both their authors and many of their readers, will be equally surprised to be told there is any thing of the kind in them with which fault can be found. The following lines are from stanzas supposed to have been written in a Cathedral :— "A thousand phantoms seem to rise "The loftiest passions and the least, * Poetical Ephemeras. + Friendship's Offering for 1832. The warrior and the poet, with a number of others, are represented as lying in the graves around, while death's memorials are above "each slumbering head;" and all are spoken of as if their souls had been entombed with their bodies. When we look upon the sepulchres where the mortal remains of the dead have mixed with the earth, we too often feel as if they-the departed-were also there; but we ought to reflect that they are not. They have, indeed, left behind them the frames which their souls were once won't to use, in order to speak to us and to look upon us, but souls without such aid can speak and see and feel in the spiritual world:-they never required the body to think, or assist them to remember, or to resolve ;—they have left for a while these frail instruments behind them-these external senses which were necessary to enable them to act their part in this sublunary scene;-but they themselves-the spirits with whom we were wont to hold converse are still in conscious being in a far different world; so we ought not to mourn over (as it were) their worn-out clothing—their decayed dwellings, (much as we may have loved these when they were animated with life,) but direct our thoughts to where the wearers--the inhabitants have gone. A verse from Wordsworth furnishes another example :"She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave—and oh ! The difference to me !" This has been called "touchingly beautiful," and it may be so; but he who lamented for the dead must have derived more comfort, if instead of looking down at the dark grave, he had raised the eye of his imagination to paradise, where the lady's spirit, it is to be hoped, resided: so she could not be said to have altogether ceased to be, when every mental faculty remained in a state of conscious existence. In lamenting for the dead, however, it is too common to carry our imaginations no farther than their graves, and the rest enjoyed by them is indiscriminately spoken of as there or in heaven, whereas in fact it can be in neither. In a pathetic and much-admired old Scottish ballad, a lover exclaims "I wish I were where Helen lies, Where night and day on me she cries; I wish I were where Helen lies, He considers the grave as the place of rest, and seems to have no thought beyond an insensible sleep there by the side of his mistress, at least till the resurrection. The dead themselves have been figured thus speaking to the living, which might be allowable enough in poetic licence, if they could properly be said to be in the earth, but it is too great a violence of possibility, even in fable, to suppose a departed ghost to speak from where it cannot be, or to imagine that dust is endowed with such a power : The following verses will be found to convey a more scriptural doctrine than those preceding them : A dream of the night when deep slumber was o'er me, The form of one dead stood before me, disclosing * Carmen di Sepolchri. Monthly Mag. Feb. 1831. Regard not my grave, it said, as where I'm lying, Then lament not I vanish'd so sudden away, For life at the longest now to us seems a day;— But resign'd to the will of th' Almighty Disposer, In the classic days of Greece and Rome several of their literati (as Lucian) wrote " Dialogues of the dead," and many of our modern authors have followed their example. Mrs. Rowe's "Letters from the Dead to the Living" was long a popular book. In all these, separate souls only are referred to -it is they who are said to meet and speak to each other; and the locality is invariably laid in the region of disembodied spirits, but the fancied situation of this place is variously described. The ancients always meant by it, either the Elysian fields or Tartarus,-never the grave. An old English author consoling one for a loss he had sustained by death, puts the case to him-"Suppose thy friend should come to thee, and say, my good friend why dost thou afflict thy soul. I am gone to the Paradise of God, a sight most beautiful to behold.-I would not live if I might again.Bid thy friends that they mourn not for thee when thou diest, unless they would wish thee to be miserable again."† In opposition to the gloomy ideas which we must feel of the state of those who are gone, by associating them in our thoughts solely with the grave, it will be found much more truly represented by the poet Rogers, in the following beautiful lines, which consider the soul as the man, when the body is returned to dust : Scripture always distinguishes between Paradise or Abraham's bosom and the highest heaven, but they are now generally confounded together. + Grief Disarmed, &c. 1682.-Republished in 1830. "When by a good man's grave I muse alone, Like those of old, on that thrice hallowed night, Says, pointing upwards, that he is not here, That he is risen." That the immortal bodies which our souls are afterwards to be clothed with, shall spring from those now lying in the grave, or which have lived and are now dead, there can be no question; for revelation distinctly informs us of this as a fact. The expression of our Lord, when he said that what lay in the grave should hear his voice and come forth at the last day, does not imply that the soul or conscious principle of man lies there too, for this would be at direct variance with many other passages in the Scriptures, particularly in the New Testament. That part of man which is dead and senseless, shall rise from the dead-from wherever it is, but that which remains alive after the death of the other, shall merely return to receive its everlasting clothing or person. It shall come from that middle state where the spirits of the departed now rest, and having been joined to a body, shall then go to the region of reward or punishment, whither the judgment can alone consign them; and, if there is any other day of account than that, when the Judge shall appear to the earth at his second coming, Holy Writ, at least, cannot be cited to establish it. Tombstones may tell us― "Here lies"-such a one, "in hopes of a blessed resurrec tion," but we might well exclaim with the poet "False marble-no! Nothing but clay can lie in death below. And it ne'er felt a hope, nor knew a thought, |