and sorrow shall be forgotten, or remembered only to enhance the joy. The farewells we bid now, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour, are not eternal farewells, but partings for a night when we retire to rest, and we shall meet at morning, to know each other and love each other with a knowledge and love of which the best families of earth give us only faint emblems. The members of the family go at different times to rest, sometimes the youngest first; but the Heavenly Father knows the time for us all, and shall bring us together without one wanting at the happy day-dawn. It can be but a brief separation at best, and then all our farewells shall be changed into rapturous welcomes. May you and all so dear to you be sustained by these hopes now, and kept together by the mighty power of God, through faith unto salvation. It is my earnest prayer and trust.

To *

GLASGOW, September 17, 1866.

Our dear friends are never forgotten in our heart of hearts; but we come to see them in a

softer and more hallowed light, freed from the bitter pain of earth's partings, and transfigured in our memory, as I believe they are really transfigured by the gracious hand of God in a better world. Then the recollection of the words, looks, and incidents of the past all come up with a soothing power. When the pain of the blow from the rod has passed, the stream will follow you through life for comfort. For her there needs no sorrow—we are so ready to expend it there-on the young, lovely, loving, with life opening in all its bloom and beautybut she needs no more the poor solace of our human affections and consolations. We are left with the outward sign of what was her presence with us, and it is laid to sleep among beloved dust; but her Father above has carried her home to that heavenly mansion of which all the love of the human family was but a faint foretoken. Being a daughter of Abraham, she has been loosed from her bonds on the Sabbathday and entered fully into that rest which remains for the people of God. With all this, I cannot think those happy departed ones are forgetful

of us, more than we are of them, but waiting the time of reunion with clear, calm expectancy, as we through our tears and struggles. The affection that has been carried to heaven is not less strong and enduring than that which is left to us, the earthly survivors, and their looks must surely go often down as ours go up, only that they see better through the cloud, and see it all on the bright celestial side. In due time He will come who entered the ruler's house, and will say, "Maid, arise!" and deliver her to her friends again in full possession. These hopes may surely endear Him who is the Centre of them all, while they relieve our sorrows and ennoble us with the consciousness of a higher life than time or death can touch.

To **

CALLANDER, September 29, 1866.

It is very likely, that after the high-wrought tension of the past weeks, there will come the reaction of nature, and that the blank will spread and darken; but by-and-by the sources

of comfort that have hitherto availed you will come in again with permanent and growing power. All these memorials will then come with a double blessing, like the dropped mantle of the prophet, which surely had some such meaning as this, to give the mourner a more tangible hold of the one who had left him. What an abiding joy in the midst of all our grief it is to reflect that our sorrow can only be for our own loss, not theirs! We do not feel this enough; at least, I have felt my own mind filled with a kind of pity for the departed, that they enjoy no more the light and affection and hope of this world; forgetting in our blindness the infinitely greater realities of truth and love on which those happy souls have entered. voice from heaven knew its own meaning when it said, "Blessed are the dead"-such dead as we mourn, now alive to God. Let us think, too, of what would be their words to us could they speak-indeed, of what were their words to us while they could speak- to remember them not with a helpless, desponding grief, but with a chastened holy sorrow that brightens away into

The

hope and action-hope to meet them again, and action to fill up the life that remains as we know they would have filled it up, and thus have them not only living beside us, but living

in us.

To *

December 24, 1866.

feelings of you all in It makes one so near far from them. But

I can enter into the turning up these letters. the departed, and yet so be sure He is near and He is the same, and union to Him will make us and our friends meet again as the same after all changes. Our hearts yearn for this. The future may be very bright, but it is from the past that our tenderness comes, and I would not care for the one without the other.

I

I send you Jean Paul's "Dream." Speaking of it set me to trying a translation. am sure you will like it—I mean the thing itself— and all the more that you have not read it in the

* See Appendix.