VII. BUT WE CAN NOT CLOSE THIS DISCUSSION WITHOUT
GLANCING AT THE MENTAL PHENOMENA SOMETIMES
EXHIBITED ON THE APPROACH OF DEATH, AS SHED-
DING ADDITIONAL LIGHT UPON THE INDESTRUCTIBLE
CHARACTER OF THE MEMORY.

It has been seen in the case of Admiral Beaufort and others, that in this quickened action of the soul, the memory seems to retrace its past history in the inverse order of the actual occurrence of its events. Taking the present as the point of its departure, it goes back through all the gradations of life to childhood and infancy.

The celebrated Dr. Rush mentions the case of an Italian gentleman, who died of yellow fever in the city of New York. At first, he spoke English; as his disease progressed, he spoke only French; but on the day of his death, the attendants were compelled to converse with him in Italian-the language of his childhood. The same gentleman also states in one of his medical works, that a Lutheran clergyman of Philadelphia informed him that Germans and Swedes, of whom he had considerable numbers in his congregation, when near death, always prayed in their native languages, though some of them, he was confident, had not spoken these languages for fifty or sixty years.

With another class of persons, dying moments are not unfrequently the occasion for the resurrection of abused privileges and perverted blessings. To the guilty conscience

"It is the busy, meddling fiend

That will not let it rest."

From the burial-places of memory, these recollections stalk forth to foreshadow his doom, and to strike deep into the soul the conviction that it is just.

Others, again, calmly dying, have spoken of the incidents of their lives as being all simultaneously presented before them as in a magic mirror-every line as if fixed upon a tablet by the light, with all the exactitude and distinctness of present reality.

These manifestations of intellectual and spiritual perception in the hour of death, seem to be but the first movement of that mighty expanding of intellectual power which shall characterize our transition from time to eternity. These facts, therefore, make it highly probable that thought is absolutely imperishable; and that whatever is written once upon the memory lives there forever. The conclusion that absolute forgetfulness, or obliteration from the memory is impossible, is warranted, then, by the sound induction of philosophy and the plain teachings of Revelation.

The events of our past history are written upon our living spirits, and will remain there forever. The facts, then, seem to justify the declaration of Mr. Coleridge, that in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away than that a single thought should be loosened or lost from the great chain of our mental operations. A thousand incidents may spread a vail between our present consciousness and the record on the soul; but there the record remains—not an inscription obscured or effaced-waiting the judgment of God. "The portrait of the soul is the perfect reflection of itself; and every man must see his own character thus forever visible to the eye of God, and, probably, hereafter, to angels and to men."

The power of reminiscence slumbers, but does not die. At the judgment-day-we are entirely at liberty to suppose, from what we know of the powers of the mind, and what we learn from the Revelation of God--it will awake!

It will summon up thought and feeling from its hidden recesses, and present before us the perfect form and representation of the past:

"Each fainter trace that memory holds,

So darkly of departed years,

In one broad glance the soul beholds,
And all that was at once appears!"

This is, undoubtedly, that "book of remembrance" that shall be opened in that great and terrible day of the Lord. By its records we shall be judged, and by its testimony will our doom be fixed.

A rich landlord in England once performed an act of tyrannical injustice to a tenant who was a widow. The widow's son was a witness of it, and afterward becoming a painter, he transferred that scene to canvas. Years afterward the rich man saw it. As his eye fell upon the picture, he turned pale and trembled; he sought to purchase it, and offered any sum that might be named as its price, that he might be able to destroy a picture that so harrowed his guilty conscience. If every scene of wickedness through which a man passes should be painted, and the paintings hung up around him, so that he would always see the portrait of himself, with the evil passions expressed on his countenance, and himself in the very act of wickedness, with nothing to mitigate the dark coloring of the picture, he would be appalled at the spectacle. Yet such a picture-gallery there is; its walls, all around, are hung with life-pictures of the soul! The deed of darkness and of sin may have been the work of a moment; but the colors that now enshrine it are fadeless and eternal! Why should not those walls be hung with pictures of taste and beauty-portraying scenes of love, and purity, and beneficence-scenes that may feast the intellect and ravish the soul-seeing it is to be its dwelling-place forever?

With what interest does the antiquarian dig up from the sands of Egypt or of Assyria some fragment of ancient art, on which he finds graven the portraits, the attitudes, the dresses, and the pursuits of men who lived and died three thousand years ago!-every lineament, every shade, every expression, just as the artist left it ages long gone by! Such life-pictures are we now inscribing upon tablets more enduring than the polished stone or the molten brass. Those pictures now pass from our view; but not to perish! And who can describe or comprehend the interest we shall feel, when from the silence of eternity shall be brought up the sculptured history of the soul, faithfully preserved, not a line broken, not a shade dimmed-hung up as a spectacle for men and angels-hung up to be gazed upon for

ever!

We are not only living a life, but we are writing a biography. The philosophy of Bacon may perish, the science of Newton be forgotten, the sublimest inventions in art may fail of record and of remembrance; but the simple volume of life, the autobiography each individual is now writing out of himself, can be neither lost nor forgotten; for it is written upon the very texture of the soul. And as the soul moves forward through all the ages of coming eternity, it shall carry along with it this marvelous record of its former life. The grand catastrophe of the world's destruction shall strike no passage from this book. Other books may become dim and dingy with age; but no lapse of time or of eternity can obscure a single page in this. From other books offensive passages may be stricken out— whole pages and chapters may be recast; but from this book nothing can be stricken, no part of it can be annulled, no part of it changed. O, then, let passages, and pages, and chapters of beauty, and love, and purity be written. upon the memory, that, in the ages to come, when the

thrones and empires of earth have crumbled away and been forgotten, and the globe itself been dissolved-they may be read and re-read with ever-increasing delight! Thus, the memories of the past shall furnish one of the sublimest sources of felicity to the soul, as it journeys onward in its unending progress to the consummation of its destiny.