Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores of death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith, and sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts.

No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist.

Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp--a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter.

And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last.
Something in the attitude of the manikins--faces they have none, they are too small for that--something in the way they swing these monstrous volumes to their singing, something perhaps borrowed from the text, some subtle differentiation from the cut that went before and the cut that follows after--something, at least, speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the last passage no less than of the glorious coming home.

There is that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with a difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling to Tyburn in the cart.