were the best encouragement of our feeble efforts--when we have seen
them sink, one by one, into the darkness of the grave, leaving the
earth more bleak and dreary year by year for those who remain--then do
we naturally follow them in spirit to those gloomy regions where one or
all may be undergoing that blessed purification which prepares them for
the eternal repose of Heaven.

Of all the divine truths which the Catholic Church proposes to her
children, assuredly none is more acceptable to the pilgrim race of Adam
than that of Purgatory. It is, beyond conception, dear and precious as
one of the links that connect the living with the vanished dead, and
which keeps them fresh in the memory of those who loved them on earth,
and whose dearest joy it is to be able to help them in that shadowy
border-land through which, in pain and sorrow, they must journey before
entering the Land of Promise, which is the City of God, seated on the
everlasting hills.

When I decided on adding yet another to the many books on Purgatory
already existing even in our own language, I, at the same time,
resolved to make it as different as possible from all the others, and
thus fill up a void of which I have long been sensible in our English
Purgatorial literature. Doctrinal works, books of devotion, e have in
abundance, but it is, unhappily, only the pious, the religiously-
inclined who will read them. Knowing this, and still desirous to
promote devotion to the Holy Souls by making Purgatory more real, more
familiar to the general reader, I thought the very best means I could
take for that end would be to make a book chiefly of legends and of
poetry, with enough of doctrinal and devotional matter to give a
substantial character to the work by placing it on the solid
foundations of Catholic dogma, patristic authority, and that, at the