PERHAPS no community of men is less subject to the thoughts which attend a realizing sense of the inevitability and imminence of death than a college community; and this for several reasons. Of these the most important is the age of its members, to which the consideration of death is both repugnant and unnatural. All our pursuits have a direct bearing on our immediate future which they presuppose, and therefore our future as a whole is apt to find no place in our calculations. We are eminently a hopeful community. Success in some one or other of its forms seems so certainly to await us on graduation, that we are impatient of delay, and hail the day with joy which introduces us to life, and bids us put to test the mighty projects fermenting in our brains. At this time of life men are wont to regard themselves as specially destined to some great work, which assures their continued existence of necessity. They were made for the world, and the world only awaits their coming to rectify its past errors. It is not till years of obstacle and failure have convinced us of the insignificant influence which our human life has on the slow and ponderous progress of the world, that the delusion ceases, and we begin to regard our life in its true relations to what has gone before and is to come. Whatever may be our philosophy or religious belief, the fact of the dissolution of the body at the end of a space of time which is as nothing to the eternity which has preceded and will succeed it is one of supreme import, which, as rational creatures, we must take into account in forming any belief.

The obituary notices in another column suggest these few remarks. The departure of those so lately associated with us cannot fail to add a new seriousness to the thoughts and life of every thinking man.