GRAVE THOUGHTS. 189 



the coffin. The appearance of the mouldering remains 

 which it contained, nothing can erase from my memory. 

 I see them even now before me in all their sad and dis- 

 gusting deformity, and still when I hear or read of the 

 empire of death of the wrecks of death or of the change 

 which death works on the human frame imagination 

 immediately reverts to a long black skeleton clothed over 

 with a mouldy earth to which in some places the rotten 

 grave-clothes are attached. This is a disgusting image, 

 but it is not a useless one, for when, thinking of death, 

 I bare my arm and look at the blue veins shining 

 through the transparent skin when I look and think 

 that the day may not, cannot, be far distant when it shall 

 become as black and as mouldy as that of the skeleton 

 I start, for there is something in the contrast which re- 

 moves all the accumulation of commonplace which the 

 habit of hearing and speaking at secondhand of death 

 hath cast upon that awful thing. 



' But what is the fruit, you will ask, of these cogita- 

 tions ? Follow me a little farther and you shall see. If 

 the soul be a mere quality affixed to matter, which shall 

 die when that matter is changed from animate into 

 inanimate, then, though the thought of the havoc which 

 death works on the human frame tends to lower the 

 pride of the haughty, it is not a harassing one to the 

 philosopher. Life is full of evil and unhappiness ; death 

 is a state of rest. When the tyrant Edward invaded this 

 country when Wallace, its bravest defender, was be- 

 trayed and slain when the carnage of Plodden filled 

 Scotland with mourning, or the defeat of Pinkie with 

 fear, I was neither sad, nor angry, nor afraid, for I was 

 not called into existence until twenty-four years ago. 

 And in a few years after this, if the soul be not immortal, 

 I shall again have passed (if I may use the expression) 



