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not always time enough to think, feel, see, hear,—love and be loved no more?"
"Yes! 'tis always too soon to lose happiness; but misery,—ah Albert!—why should misery, when it can so easily be stilled, be endured?"
"Stilled, Elinor?—What mean you? By annihilation?—How an infidel assumes fortitude to wish for death, is my constant astonishment! To believe in the eternal loss of all he holds, or knows, or feels; to be persuaded that 'this sensible, warm being,' will 'melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,'—and to believe that there all ends! Surely every species of existence must be preferable to such an expectation from its cessation! Dust! literal dust!—Food for worms!—to be trod upon;—crushed;—dug up;—battered down;—is that our termination? That,—and nothing more?"
"'Tis shocking, Albert, no doubt; shocking and disgusting. Yet why dis-
