will never be satisfied on this side Jordan's wave. Never, ah! never!
What man or woman mourns his dead in the bitter, ice-bound winter as they do in the tender, warm, passionate spring, when every flower and bud and leaf and bird is quick and living, rioting in life, and praising God each after his kind? All things seem to remember.
The birds cry, "We are calling him, we are calling him!" The leaves rustle and whisper, "Where is he, where?" The flowers murmur, as they shake their bells, "He used to pass this way." Every tiny blade of grass, every trill of the black-bird, brings the past quivering before us—the days when we had our beloved, and could look in his face, and put out our hands to touch him, that we seek to bridge and cannot, with a bitter, yearning pain that is the intenser by reason of its impotence. To some people forgetfulness comes naturally and unconsciously; day by day memory softly detaches first one link, then another; in the bustle and moving to and fro in the vigorous, working-day world, the lost or the parted from gradually become vague, impalpable receding shadows, dear still but indistinct; unlike that first horrible sense of loss that was theirs when their darlings were snatched suddenly from their side, and, whereas a minute before they had been face to face with them, now they were not; the full minute ago, the empty present standing side by side in bare and shocking contrast. Who that remembers has not a hurt anger at the quickness with which mortals forget? Do not our dead and absent ones seem to cry to us out of the darkness, "Speak for us, for we cannot speak for ourselves"? It is the noisy, selfish, living, and present people, who fill our ears with common, everyday talk, and shoulder the memory of those others away. "The proud contempt of spirits risen," has been grandly sung; with more truth and less beauty has it been said, that "a live dog is better than a dead lion." If
