that they were already dying creatures, and that the life for which they had been formed was already departed. They now heard the yet unknown process by which their death should be made complete; the mighty load of woes which was bound inseparably to death; the tremendous conflict of which the earth was to be the battleground, that death might not reach the spirit; and the final victory in which death, and he that had the power of death, should be trodden under foot, notwithstanding their present triumph. The sentence which before had been only awful, now breathed compassion. Its thunders fell upon the head of the tempter. He, like his poor instrument, the brute serpent, was doomed to make his path in the dust, hated and hating, and at length to be crushed by the heel of a human conqueror. A mark of peculiar sorrow was fixed upon the hour which gives birth to a mortal; a mark, that should fitly betoken the gateway of a world of tears. But she who bore it should still be the mother of the living; her desire, submissive but affectionate and full of solace for her griefs, should be to her husband; and love and hope were still left to her who had forfeited Eden. A curse was laid upon the earth, that it might produce spontaneously the fruits of death, all noxious and useless herbs, and only yield to the hard toil of man his necessary food. While he should open its surface, he was ever to be reminded, too, that there his own limbs must find their final rest: but it should still give him abundant bread; and labour, with all its weariness, would be his relief and his protection. After a longer or a shorter space, thus crowded with anxiety and sorrow, the close must arrive: the dissolution of his original state, gradual as it was, should be completed; and he should return to his kindred dust. But if he had lost Paradise, and even life, through the fraud of the tempter; and if that tempter was yet to be no victor, but a foe trodden under foot by the seed of that woman whom he had deceived, this close itself could be no mere triumph of the author of evil. The soul, which would not die, might find a release in death, and the very body, which seemed through the sentence his inalienable prey, might yet be rescued through his defeat, and live again. Hoping, therefore, in the midst of grief, the first man named the first woman, "Eve," the "living," as the mother of all living "Man is to live, and all things live for man." But Paradise, however it might be changed, was no fit abode for those to whom the Tree of Life was now forbidden. To have tasted that fruit, if its original effect could now have followed the taste, would have been only to have made sorrow and sin immortal. Our parents were, therefore, in mercy as well as in justice, banished from Eden; and angels and a flaming sword forbade every presumptuous approach; till Paradise itself was no more. The flood left no tradition of the time when these bright guards were last seen by human eyes; and no mortal beheld when the trees of the garden, and with them that wondrous tree in their midst, withered away. Over the soil from which they grew, and into which, perhaps, they sank, the waters may have spread some plain of sand, where now above the wreck of Paradise, some Mesopotamian caravan, weary with the journey, and fearful of attack, halts for a night. IV. Che Number of the Dead. "Earth has hosts, but thou canst show Many myriads for her one!" CROLY. THE mind sinks under the number, almost numberless, of those who have been successively the inhabitants of this world, and have bowed, in their turns, to the common sentence. Scarce one in many, many thousands, has left more than the briefest echo of his name; yet of each it is true that "He was whatever thou hast been, The present population of the earth is estimated, with seeming probability, at a thousand millions. Almost six thousand years are numbered, since the creation. The first two thousand years embraced about eighteen generations, before the life of man had its present limits. During the later four thousand years, three generations have lived within each century. The succession of generations may therefore be computed at a hundred and forty. Of the population of the earth before the flood, not even the most conjectural calculation can be ventured; but probably the prevalence of violence and crime may have prevented that vast increase, which, in so long a space, and when the frame so defied disease, might else have overspread the globe. After the flood, the Eastern lands, Egypt, Assyria, India, China, were soon the seats of mighty empires; of which some were for a time, and others have been to this day, obeyed by the most compact and multitudinous populations. The remoter lands were more gradually and more thinly peopled, and the history of many generations is covered with impenetrable darkness; but except among the wildest barbarians, the population supposed before accurate knowledge could be obtained has commonly been less than that which actually appeared after better inquiry. It will not be an extravagant, although an uncertain computation, if the average number of each generation be reckoned at one fifth of the present; and then the entire number would be twenty-eight thousands of millions. To admit such a number into the imagination, we can conceive that twenty-eight of the chief empires of the earth contained each a hundred provinces, and that each of these provinces contained five cities of the magnitude of London. These fourteen thousand Londons could perhaps embrace the armies of the dead. The city of Nineveh must have been inhabited, through several ages, by more than five hundred thousand persons; and probably its mounds look down upon what remains of six or seven millions. A still vaster multitude is covered by the desolate plain of Babylon. Not less than fifteen millions of bodies must, in the space of twenty-five centuries, have been mingled with the dust of Christian and Pagan Rome. At least half as many more must sleep under the new Rome of Constantine. Some of the great capitals of the remote East bury several millions in a century. But, in truth, the bones of hosts more numerous than ever stood living on one spot have been laid beneath many a fair town whose inhabitants may scarce ever have thought how the progress of ages had made their home so prodigious a sepulchre. Two millions of skulls are arranged in the catacombs of Paris. The ten thousand parishes of England contain ten thousand churchyards; and the clay of every churchyard contains a part of thousands of frames, once warm and buoyant. It is enough to make the simple comparison between the present population of any old district or town, and its collective population in all the past; and the mind will grasp the superior number of the dead beyond the living. "All that tread The globe, are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom." The surface of the earth, so far as it is dry land, is estimated at nearly forty millions of square miles. If twenty-eight thousands of millions of inhabitants have sojourned upon it, and could once more be distributed over it, every square mile would receive seven hundred persons. The average population of England is about two hundred and sixty for a square mile, that of the whole territory of the United States less than eight. Could the dead live again upon the earth, they would make every spot almost three times as populous as the British isles, and almost a hundred fold more than the American Republic. On individuals so numberless the decree that sends man to his dust has already passed into execution. The dead exceed fivefold the minutes since the creation; and in the last hour more than three thousand bodies must have fallen. Every year, one individual amongst |