It is only by taking them to our feasts, keeping up with them the same old human companionship, that we may hope to keep the dead as friends.

A modern poet has written eight lines which were of great comfort to Theophil,-- "You go not to the headstone As aforetime every day, And I who died, I do not chide, Because, dear friend, you play; "But in your playing think of him Who once was kind and dear, And if you see a beauteous thing, Just say: 'He is not here.'" Here it seemed to Theophil was the whole duty of faithfulness.

The dead know that if we remember them in our hours of joy, they are indeed remembered; and if they know anything at all, they will understand the waywardness of sad hearts better than sad hearts understand themselves.
Yet, indeed, save in the exercise of his faculties, Theophil had no joy to reproach himself with.

Surely returning spring, with its terrible exuberance of warm life, was no joy.

Perhaps he had looked on Jenny lying dead with less anguish than he one day beheld an apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun.