Life was a perpetual joy, springing, not from boyish thoughtlessness or youthful indifference, but from a maturity of mind, which with the growth of years, accepted its vicissitudes of good and ill as alike blessings sent by a Father's hand. Even death was but the birth of a new life, the blessed Liberator bringing to thousands the first great joy of existence.
When Rosalind's emotion had subsided, nothing seemed real. All was dreamy, shadowy. As they laid him beneath the pine-tree's shade, amid the glorious beauty of that Indian summer day, she felt the awakening vigor of a new life, as if spring-time had come, and was bursting forth in song amid the solemn arches of that majestic grove where so many had lain them down in their last sleep, but over whose spirits the grave had no power. Often as she had trodden those paths by her father's side and watched the day's soft decline through the wild lattice work of dense foliage which no human hand ever imitated, when the last rays of the setting sun sent his golden beams across the silvery waters to this chosen site of the honored dead, discoursing of the beauty which tree and shrub and tiny floweret lent to the impressiveness of the service to which it was consecrated, he had never seemed so near, nor the sky overhead appeared so glorious, nor such celestial voices floated round her as now. Millions of angels sung their anthems of welcome to him who had just yielded to the divine summons, which the inspiration of the hour wafted in voiceless yet audible strains to the quick ear of the soul's intuition.
"Dust to its narrow house beneath,
Soul to its rest on high."
