agreeably to my own arrangement, and the rest took their places in the
order of consanguinity and age. I did not see Rupert in the procession at
all, though I saw little beside the hearse that bore the body of my only
sister. When we reached the church-yard, the blacks of the family pressed
forward to bear the coffin into the building. Mr. Hardinge met us there,
and then commenced those beautiful and solemn rites which seldom fail to
touch the hardest heart. The rector of St. Michael's had the great
excellence of reading all the offices of the church as if he felt them;
and, on this occasion, the deepest feelings of the heart seemed to be
thrown into his accents. I wondered how he could get on; but Mr. Hardinge
felt himself a servant of the altar, standing in his master's house, and
ready to submit to his will. Under such circumstances it was not a trifle
that could unman him. The spirit of the divine communicated itself to me.
I did not shed a tear during the whole of the ceremony, but felt myself
sustained by the thoughts and holy hopes that ceremony was adapted to
inspire. I believe Lucy, who sat in a far corner of the church, was
sustained in a similar manner; for I heard her low sweet voice mingling in
the responses. Lip service! Let those who would substitute their own crude
impulses for the sublime rites of our liturgy, making ill digested forms
the supplanter of a ritual carefully and devoutly prepared, listen to one
of their own semi-conversational addresses to the Almighty over a grave,
and then hearken to these venerable rites, and learn humility. Such men
never approach sublimity, or the sacred character that should be impressed
on a funeral ceremony, except when they borrow a fragment here and there
from the very ritual they affect to condemn. In their eagerness to
dissent, they have been guilty of the weakness of dissenting, so far as
forms are concerned, from some of the loftiest, most comprehensive, most
consolatory and most instructive passages of the inspired book!

It was a terrible moment when the first clod of the valley fell on my