rfect and so enshrined

[Khalaf]

Ences; to whom our possessions, our houses, lands, goods, money, are
such substantial things;--it cannot be that we are not fixed permanently
here,--that the years like a swift river, sweep us nearer and nearer to
a point where we must sink and leave it all,--that the corridors of the
earth echo our footsteps only as the footsteps of a successive
march-myriads going before, and myriads coming after us-and soon they
will catch no more murmurs of our individual life; for that will be as
"a tale that is told." The whole train of thought I am now pursuing
strikes us with peculiar force, in reading the biographies of men who
have lived intensely, who have realized the fulness of life, who have
mingled intimately with its varied experiences, and occupied a large
place in it. We see how to them life was, as it is to us, an absorbing
fact,--how they have planned, and thought, and acted, as though they
were to live forever; and yet we have noticed the premonitions of
change, the dropping away of friends, the failing of vigor, the
deepening of melancholy shadows, and the coming of the end; the business
closed, the active curiosity and intermeddling ceased, the familiar
haunts abandoned, the home made desolate, the lights put out, the cup
fallen beneath the festal board, and all the earnest existence stopped
forever. And this, too, so quick,--filling so small a space in absolute
time! From their illustration let us, then, realize that our life, too,
amid all these real conditions, is unfolding rapidly to an end, and is
"as a tale that is told." But life is like a tale that is told, because
of its comprehensiveness. It is a common characteristic of a narrative
that it contains a great deal in a small compass. It includes many
years, and exp
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