The picturesque pocket companion, and visitor's guide, through Mount Auburn

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[220] cannot but exert a favorable moral influence. It has already been remarked that it speaks in a voice full of tenderness and of truth. Its instructions reach not the ear, indeed, but they do reach the heart. By it, the departed friend is recalled in all but a visible presence, and by it, “he, being dead, yet speaketh.” At such a time, how faithfully will the grave of your friend remind you of the pleasant moments when you were conversing with him in the living tones of affection and truth! when you were opening your hearts to each other, and becoming partakers, each of the other's hopes and purposes and cares; when with a generous confidence those secret things were shown to one another, which were locked up in the heart from all the world beside! Will the grave of your friend allow you to forget his single-heartedness in serving you; his unsullied honor; his plighted faith; his readiness to expose himself to danger that he might save you from it; and the calmness with which, when he perceived that his hold on life was breaking away, he gave up life's hopes, and, turning his eyes for the last time to the light, and looking up, for the last time, to the faces of those who loved him, he bade farewell to all, and gave up his spirit to the disposal of his God? Is all this forgotten, when you stand by his grave? Does not his very grave speak to you? Does it not bear its testimony to the value of youthful purity and truth, and of the power of an humble confidence in the Most High, to give dignity to the character of the young, and to disarm Death of the most dreadful of his weapons, even when he comes for his most dreadful work — to cut off life in the beauty of its morning?