30 32 33 34 35 --- ---- 47 a Daughter, in Affliction MEMOIRS OF THE REV. JOHN COOKE. THE feeling which first prompts us to preserve a memorial▸ of departed friends, evidently originates in that passion for immortality, which is among the first and the last efforts of human thought. The simplest state of this feeling is that which excites to the erection of the humble monumental stone, intended to mark and consecrate the place of inhumation. We have no reason to doubt that the attempt to memorialize the dead has been coeval with the race of man. Nor need we suppose, that the erection of the first pillar to the remembrance of departed worth, was designed as a simple recognition of the spot in which their remains were interred, but as a precise mode of embodying the recollections of their excellence, that by the fond and studious imitation of them, in the anticipation of falling ourselves beneath the stroke of death, we might go forward under an inspiring hope of a higher association in that state of new existence which awaits us. But when the monumental pillar becomes a brief and emphatic register of the character of the departed, we then aim to perpetuate beyond our own recollection and existence, the memory of those we have lost. This is the more developed and improved state, in which the same passion for immortality displays itself, among B |