’If singing breath, if echoing chord
    To every hidden pang were given,
  What endless melodies were poured,
    As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven.’

If breath to every hidden prayer were given, could it be singing breath?  Would it not be a wail monotonous as the dirge of the November wind over the dead summer, a wail for lost hopes, lost joys, lost loves?  Or the monotony would be varied—­as is the wind by fitful gusts—­by shrieks of despair, cries of agony.  No, no, there is no use in trying to modulate our woes,—­’we’re all wrong,—­the time in us is lost.’

            ’Henceforth I’ll bear
  Affliction, till it do cry out itself,
    “Enough, enough,” and die.’

But why talk thus? why mourn over dead hopes, dead joys, dead loves?  ’Tis best to bury the dead out of our sight, and from them will spring many humbler hopes, quieter joys, more lowly affections, which ’smell sweet’ though they ‘blossom in the dust,’ and they are the only resurrection these dead ones can ever have.  I have been reading, in Maury’s Geography of the Sea, how the sea’s dead are preserved; how they stand like enchanted warders of the treasures of the deep, unchanged, except that the expression of life is exchanged for the ghastliness of death.  So, down beneath the surface currents do some deep souls preserve their dead hopes, joys, loves.  Oh, this is unwise; this is not as God intended; for, unlike the sea’s dead, there will be for these no resurrection.

Thus far I wrote, when the current of my thoughts was changed by a lively tune struck up by a hand-organ across the street.  I am not ‘good’ at distinguishing tunes, but this one I had so often heard in childhood, and had so wondered at its strange title, that I could but remember it.  It was ‘The Devil’s Dream.’  Were I a poet, I would write the words to it;—­but then, too, I would need be a musician to compose a suitable new tune to the words!  The rattling, reckless notes should be varied by those sad enough to make an unlost angel weep—­an unlost angel, for, to the hot eyes of the lost, no tears can come.  ’The Devil’s Dream’—­perhaps it is of Heaven.  Doubtless, frescoed in heavenly colors on the walls of his memory, are scenes from which fancy has but to brush the smoke and grime of perdition to restore them to almost their original beauty.  I could even pity the ‘Father of lies,’ the ’Essence of evil,’ the ‘Enemy of mankind,’ when I think of the terrible awaking.  But does he ever sleep?  Has there since the fall been a pause in his labors?  Perhaps the reason this tune-time is so fast is because he is dreaming in a hurry,—­must soon be up and doing.  But it is my opinion that he has so wound up the world to wickedness, that he might sleep a hundred years, and it would have scarcely begun to run down on his awaking; when, from the familiar appearance of all things, he would swear ‘it was but an after-dinner nap.’  Indeed he