Verses Referring to Life and Death
The fact that “Religion never was designed to make our pleasures less” appears seldom or never to have entered into the minds of those who set the verses for young sampler workers. From the earliest days when they plied their needle their thoughts were directed to the shortness of life and the length of eternity, and many a healthy and sweet disposition must have run much chance of being soured by the morbid view which it was forced to take of the pleasures of life. For instance, a child of seven had the task of broidering the following lines:—
“And now my soul another year
Of thy short life is past
I cannot long continue here
And this may be my last.”
And one, no older, is made to declare that:—
“Thus sinners trifle, young and old,
Until their dying day,
Then would they give a world of gold
To have an hour to pray.”
Or:—
“Our father ate forbidden Fruit,
And from his glory fell;
And we his children thus were brought
To death, and near to hell.”
Or again:—
“There’s not a sin that we commit
Nor wicked word we say
But in thy dreadful book is writ
Against the judgment day.”
A child was not even allowed to wish for length of days. Poor little Elizabeth Raymond, who finished her sampler in 1789, in her eighth year, had to ask:—
“Lord give me wisdom to direct my ways
I beg not riches nor yet length of days
My life is a flower, the time it hath to last
Is mixed with frost and shook with every blast.”
A similar idea runs through the following:—
“Gay dainty flowers go simply to decay,
Poor wretched life’s short portion flies away;
We eat, we drink, we sleep, but lo anon
Old age steals on us never thought upon.”
Not less lugubrious is Esther Tabor’s sampler, who, in 1771, amidst charming surroundings of pots of roses and carnations, intersperses the lines:—
“Our days, alas, our mortal days
Are short and wretched too
Evil and few the patriarch says
And well the patriarch knew.”
A very common verse, breathing the same strain, is:—
“Fragrant the rose, but it fades in time
The violet sweet, but quickly past the Prime
White lilies hang their head and soon decay
And whiter snow in minutes melts away
Such and so with’ring are our early joys
Which time or sickness speedily destroys.”
And the melancholy which pervades the verse on the sampler of Elizabeth Stockwell ([Fig. 14]) is hardly atoned for by the brilliant hues in which the house is portrayed.
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Plate VII.—Sampler by Hannah Dawe.
17th Century.
Formerly in the Author’s Collection.
This is a much smaller specimen than we are wont to find in “long” Samplers, for it measures only 18 × 7¼. It differs also from its fellows in that the petals of the roses in the second and third of the important bands are in relief and superimposed. The rest of the decoration, on the other hand, partakes much more of an outline character than is usual. As a specimen of a seventeenth-century Sampler it leaves little to be desired. It is signed Hannah Dawe.
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Fig. 14.—Sampler by Elizabeth Stockwell. 1832.
The late Mr A. Tuer.
The gruesomeness of the grave is forcibly brought to notice in a sampler dated 1736:—
“When this you see, remember me,
And keep me in your mind;
And be not like the weathercock
That turn att every wind.
When I am dead, and laid in grave,
And all my bones are rotten,
By this may I remembered be
When I should be forgotten.”
Ann French put the same sentiment more tersely in the lines:—
“This handy work my friends may have
When I am dead and laid in grav.” 1766.
It is a relief to turn to the quainter and more genuine style of Marg’t Burnell’s verse taken from Quarles’s “Emblems,” and dated 1720:—
“Our life is nothing but a winters day,
Some only breake their fast, & so away,
Others stay dinner, & depart full fed,
The deeper age but sups and goes to bed.
Hee’s most in debt, that lingers out the day,
Who dyes betimes, has lesse and lesse to pay.”
This verse has crossed the Atlantic, and figures on American samplers.
But the height of despair was not reached until the early years of the nineteenth century, when “Odes to Passing Bells,” and such like, brought death and the grave into constant view before the young and hardened sinner thus:—
ODE TO A PASSING BELL
“Hark my gay friend that solemn toll
Speaks the departure of a soul
’Tis gone, that’s all we know not where,
Or how the embody’d soul may fare
Only this frail & fleeting breath
Preserves me from the jaws of death
Soon as it fails at once I’m gone
And plung’d into a world not known.”
Ann Gould Seller, Hawkchurch, 1821.
Samplers oftentimes fulfilled the rôle of funeral cards, as, for instance, this worked in black:—
“In memory of my beloved Father
John Twaites who died April 11 1829.
Life how short—Eternity how long.
Also of James Twaites
My grandfather who died Dec. 31, 1814.
How loved, how valu’d once, avails thee not
To whom related, or by whom begot,
A heap of dust alone remains of thee,
’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.”
Curiously enough, whilst compiling this chapter the writer came across an artillery non-commissioned officer in the Okehampton Camp who, in the intervals of attending to the telephone, worked upon an elaborate Berlin woolwork sampler, ornamented with urns, and dedicated “To the Memory of my dear father,” etc.