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310 rottenness at the core of our noblest hopes, that weakness in the truest of our affections. Strange that it should thus control the spiritual; but the grave is opened, and there let it perish in darkness and in corruption. Not so the soul, which gave it imagination, intellect, affection, hope—all that can redeem mortality; in their very nature these are imperishable, and out of them have grown all good things on earth. The lasting works of philosophy and poetry, the long-enduring efforts that have been wrought in marble, the pyramids whose age we know not, the statue still a vision of beauty, the influence that individual minds have exercised over their kind,—all these are types of that immortality which gives life to our present, and will give eternity to our future. Faint, but glorious revealings of another world!

A weary burden is our human life, from the first even to the last. We talk of the happiness of childhood!—in what does it consist?—in the denied delight, and in the enforced task! Think how the child must turn from the wearisome page, whose future value it is impossible then to appreciate—turn from its dry and intricate characters to gaze upon the sun shining on the grass, and grudge the hours that must pass before play-time!