THi: DANCE OF DEATH.

slight Indeed. This rending asunder of the twin componentsof humanity, like everything else which comes within the ken ofthat humanity, is personified. Death, like the Devil, is consideredone real person. It has always been so. But while the ancientsshewed Death as brother to Sleep—a veiled figure, dim, unknown,mysterious—we, of the Gothic type, rush rudely into the charnel-house, and dragging forth the earthy scaffold of our earthly frame,endow it with a Satanically malicious spirit all of our own con-ception, and cry Behold ! This is Death !

What power, too, has not the phantom's malignancy hadgiven him by painters and poets: says Drexelius," Tho' Death with drowsie Eyes does winkat Health,And lets you live a little while

by stealth ;Yet he'll awake, and vext at past

delay,Snatch you with sad surprisinghaste away."

The same writer indeed says that Death is sudden, butbeautiful ; yet only, it seems, when he snatches us at our work.Everywhere we find Death considered a monster, that, likeAssanus Sassa the Turk, takes our old clothes from us, howevermuch we prefer them, compelling us to take in exchange newgarments we would rather be without.

Doubtless this embodiment of Death in a repulsive, vengeful,hateful, personal form, was originally adopted to admonish thoseof wicked life, who could not look forward to the embraces ofmother earth without feeling that for them dry bones had nonebut a terrible meaning. The universal recognition of the ghastlyfiguritivism, however, seems also to have some ground in the