grave spots unhallowed by religious associations. They who deny their
God, and cavil at his Word, can have no reverence for places which, like
his houses of prayer and the consecrated receptacles of the dead, derive
all their sanctity and influence from a belief in his mercies, and a
sense of our demerits--hence, having banished themselves from their
Father's house, they are content to 'lie down in the grave like the
beasts that perish.' Whilst, on the contrary, the simply virtuous, the
sincerely religious, the soberly pious, without attaching any value as
to the future destination of the soul, to the spot in which its earthly
sister may crumble to its kindred dust, cherish the pleasing hope that
their mortal bodies may repose in those places alone which religion
hallows. They long not for pleasure grottos or druidical coppices, in
which to be gathered to their fathers, but dwelling with chastened hope
on the glories of the resurrection, they desire their mortal particles
may be found when the Lord cometh to complete his victory over the
grave, in the spot, and contiguous to the house 'in which he has chosen
to place his name there.'

"From the same fountain of ethereal purity, deduced through this genuine
principle of amiability, is derived that love of country which makes his
Alps and Avalanches dear to the Swiss, and suggested that beautiful
image to the Mantuan muse, of the Grecian soldier remembering in the
last struggles of death his pleasant Argos. It is this which makes us
revert, with ever verdant freshness, to our homes and native places, and
binds us to the land of our birth with adamantine links. From the
burning desarts of sunny Africa--from the wild tornados of the gusty
West--from the mountains of ice piled by a thousand ages, like
impassable barriers round each frozen pole--from the fertile plains and
trackless forests of Australia, frequently rises, like a breeze of
sweetest incense, the fond remembrance of our _native land_; which, even