chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.' I cannot, and after your impressive and exact his tory of his last days, I need not say anything of the close of those long years of suffering, active and passive, and that slow ebbing of life; the body, without help or hope, feeling its doom steadily though slowly drawing on; the mind mourning for its suffering friend, companion, and servant, mourning also, sometimes, that it must be 'unclothed,' and take its flight all alone into the infinite unknown; dying daily, not in the heat of fever, or in the insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, but having the mind calm and clear, and the body conscious of its own decay,—— dying, as it were, in cold blood. One thing I must add. That morning when you were obliged to leave, and when cold obstruction's apathy' had already begun its reign-when he knew us, and that was all, and when he followed us with his dying and loving eyes, but could not speak-the end came; and then, as through life, his will asserted itself supreme in death. With that love of order and decency which was a law of his life, he deliberately composed him 6 placing his body at rest, as if setting his house er before leaving it, and then closed his eyes at his last look-the look his body carried to the grave and faced dissolution in—was that of sweet, dignified self-possession. I have made this letter much too long, and have said many things in it I never intended saying, and omitted much I had hoped to be able to say. must end. Yours ever affectionately, But I J. BROWN. DR. CHALMERS. 'Fervet immensusque ruit.'-HOR. 'His memory long will live alone In all our hearts, as mournful light That broods above the fallen sun, And dwells in heaven half the night. 'He was not one man, he was a thousand men.'-SYDNEY SMITH. DR. CHALMERS. HEN, towards the close of some long summer WH 6 day, we come suddenly, and, as we think, before his time, upon the broad sun, sinking down in his tranquillity' into the unclouded west; we cannot keep our eyes from the great spectacle;—and when he is gone, the shadow of him haunts our sight with the spectre of his brightness, which is dark when our eyes are open; luminous when they are shut we see everywhere,-upon the spotless heaven, upon the distant mountains, upon the fields, and upon the road at our feet,—that dim, strange, changeful image; and if our eyes shut, to recover themselves, we still find in them, like a dying flame, or like a gleam in a dark place, the unmistakable phantom of the mighty orb that has set,—and were we to sit down, as we have often done, and try to record by pencil or by pen, our impression of that supreme hour, still would IT be there. We must have patience with our eye, it will not let the im H |