LIFE LESSONS. IN I. A PICTURE OF LIFE. "They walk on in darkness."-PSALM 1xxxv. 5. N one of our New England villages is a graveyardin most respects not unlike scores of others-in which sleep the remains of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, belonging to past generations. Many a moss-covered gravestone is there, and "many a holy text" is sculptured on those monuments which, ever sinking deeper in the sod, or already fallen to the earth, seem themselves to envy the oblivion of the dust they cover, and by their own crumbling and decay, as well as their inscriptions, "teach the rustic moralist to die." But human enterprise has for many years been busy, encroaching upon that sacred enclosure. A valuable quarry, cropping out on the neighboring bank, offered that temptation which to the industry and thrift of our countrymen is irresistible. The rock was quarried and carried away, leaving as the excavation approached the graveyard, a precipitous wall from thirty to fifty feet high. Still pressing on, the laborers cleared the rock away, till only at a single narrow point could the graveyard be approached, and at last, this too was assaulted, threatening to change the peninsular into a rock-walled island of the dead. What a spectacle! Human enterprise sweeping around such a spot as that, sparing it indeed, but leaving it isolated and inaccessible, chafing against it as a barrier, and shaking the sacred dust of its graves with the shock of its explosions, disturbing the hallowed silence appropriate to it, by the echoes of rude voices and the din of pick and chisel, and desecrating, to the extremest verge of possibility, the scene where friendship had found sad pleasure to linger, and affection had been wont to weep! From morning till night, human industry is intensely active, almost beneath the shadow of the monuments, but it has itself built up the wall, that keeps it, although so near, from all contact with them, or any chance to peruse the stone-graven lines that speak the solemn lessons of the grave. Unheeding toil takes no thought of the voices that seem flung back to it, in every echo of its blows, from those rocky walls within which the dust of the dead finds repose. Who can regard such a spectacle without feeling that it is emblematic-that a painter, turning from the picture of Cole's "Voyage of Life," might have been warranted in selecting this as the picture of life itself—its energy, activity, and enterprise, rolling on like a torrent, till it touches the realm of the dead, then pausing only to circle around it, and sweep away every approach, every foot-path by which human thought draws near to meditate on human destiny, or by which the toiling laborer himself might mount up to read the lessons of his own mortality? It is a sad truth, that the industry and energy of man too often work just to wall him out from ready access to the sphere of serious thought and religious meditation. He digs and mines and excavates, only to rear higher and render more insuperable the barriers that shut him out from converse with his higher interests or communion with his God. There he is his life long-under the very shadow of graves and monuments, the dust of the departed crumbling around him, as it shakes with the stroke of enterprise encroaching on its domain; and yet every hour, as he plunges deeper for new treasures, he is but building higher that precipitous wall which shuts him out from access to what is so near, and casts ever deeper and darker shadows over his scene of toil. Thus he forgets where he is; he forgets what he is. He heeds not that soon the waves of enterprise will roll and chafe around his own grave. If there is anything that may well occasion surprise it is the thoughtlessness of dying men-their thoughtlessness with regard to their spiritual and eternal interests. They traverse seas. They explore continents. They pry into the secrets of the wilderness. They climb the snow-capped mountains. They mark the transit of distant planets. They unroll antique parchments and pore over moth-eaten volumes. They excavate buried cities like Nineveh and Pompeii. They decipher old inscriptions and scrutinize Egyptian hieroglyphs. They study the fossil autographs of dead ages, on the rocky pages of the earth, till the globe becomes their library, and cataracts and currents cut the leaves of long sealed volumes that they may be read. They question the microscope for the minute wonders of creative skill in the structure of a sand grain, an animalcule, or a snow-flake. They dissolve air and water into their original elements, and unfold the laws that govern the combination of these elements. They track the lightning to its lair, tame it and teach it, charged with messages, to leap along their iron wires. They penetrate the invisible realm of mind, search out its constitution, the order of its faculties, the methods of their operation, the laws by which they are governed. They give wing to fancy and revel in the strange, weird domain of imaginary existence, surrendering their being almost to the spell of fiction and romance, and yet while the mind is thus roused to intense activity, while the waves of the sea of human thought roll on and cover almost every thing tangible or conceivablethe one great theme which towers above others like the Alps above their valleys, is left, like a mountain island of the ocean, neglected and unexplored. Men are intent to study the world around, but not the world within them. They read the doom of nations and forget their own. They decipher old crumbling monuments of stone, but translate not the inscriptions on the living tablets of the heart. They linger spell-bound over the poet's page. They sit at the feet of the philosopher. They listen to the sagacity of statesmen. They are kindled to enthusiasm by the creations of the artist, or by the magnificent span of cathedral domes, and yet when a "greater than the temple," a "greater than Solomon," he that "spake as never man spake," opens his lips to reveal the secrets, of the life eternal, they turn away, with stolid indifference or cold contempt. Can this be so? Can it be that man can so regard all things else, and forget himself? Can it be that the one subject of thought, which to him is most important, most vital, which transcends every other, which confronts him perpetually wherever he turns, that is suggested in all the forms of nature, the buried seed, the fading flower, the ripening harvest-that is whispered in all the seasons, in the springtime that bids him sow the seed, in the sum mer that shows him a thousand symbols of that higher beauty which the soul may win, in the autumn with its harvests, asking him what from all his years angel reapers shall gather, in the winter that speaks of age that will need a shelter and support which nature cannot give -can it be that this one subject thus suggested, and suggested ever also by his own experience, by the cravings of the soul, by the aspirations of hope, by irrepressible longings for immortality, nay, by his failing strength and tear-dimmed eye, by the badges of mourning, the funeral procession, the graveyard mound, the dull echo of the clods as they strike the coffin lid-can it be that this one subject of his own personal spiritual destiny thus pressed on his notice, thus whispered in every breath, thus photographed in every scene, is just the one of all others which he banishes from his thoughts, and which for him is left to stand amid the surging ocean-waves of human activity precipitous and inaccessible like the island of the dead? It is a humiliating question to answer, but it is not a difficult one. The answer is before us, in what we see and hear and feel. That which justly claims human attention first, is neglected till the last. How it must be thrust upon men before they will entertain it! How it comes knocking at the door, and is left unheeded! How it speaks but gains no reply! How men turn their back upon it, and haste away, one to his farm and another to his merchandise! How thorough is their practical oblivion of their spiritual destiny! Sabbath after Sabbath traces solemn words on the memory, but the first ripple of week-day traffic rolls over them and shows that they have been traced on the sand. What a wondrous art of forgetfulness! What a perfection of heedlessness! There, right before them, like |