FINIS CORONAT OPUS
The Burial Places of Europe
According to the XII Tables (the earliest code of Roman Law), burial within the walls of ancient Rome was strictly prohibited, though the Senate reserved the right, in rare instances, to make exception as a mark of special honor. Many of the Roman families preferred cremation, while others adhered to the custom of unburnt burial. To accommodate the former, large chambers, filled with niches or recesses, called Columbaria, were provided, as receptacles for the vases containing the ashes left after burning. For the latter, the sarcophagus, the mausoleum, the catacomb, the excavation in the tufa rock, furnished the usual sepulture. These burial places lined the roads leading out of Rome, and many of them still remain along the Appian Way. The frontage of the principal roads became so valuable for burial purposes that it was customary to add after the inscription of names and dates on the monuments a record of the number of feet in the front and depth of every lot. The most ancient of the Roman burial places still in existence is the tomb of the Scipios, in the fork between the Via Appia and the Via Latina, and the most magnificent mausoleum was that of Hadrian, which was lined throughout with Parian marble, and surrounded by rows of statues between columns of variegated Oriental marbles. Its chambers were rifled by the Goths under Alaric; it was afterwards converted into a fortress by Belisarius; and for centuries it has been known as the Castle of S. Angelo.
The Campo Santo of Pisa is the prototype of the covered or cloistered cemetery, having been constructed in the thirteenth century. The vast rectangle within this singular structure is surrounded by arcades of white marble, and within their enclosed spaces the walls are covered with historic paintings by famous Tuscan artists. Aside from its strange-looking sarcophagi, its antique devices, and its curious inscriptions, there are two objects of more than passing interest. The earth, to the depth of several feet, was brought from Palestine, not so much from sentimental considerations, as because, of supposed antiseptic and rapidly decomposing properties. The other, hanging on the west wall, is the enormous blockading chain that was used in the harbor of Pisa. It was captured by the Genoese forces in 1362, and restored to Pisa in 1848.
The southern cemetery of Munich, just outside the Sendling Gate, is another cloistered rectangular structure, or campo santo, less attractive historically than that of Pisa, being quite modern, but in point of decorative art, inasmuch as Munich is one of the favored centres of the fine arts, infinitely superior. It is a museum of tombs, most of whose occupants were wealthy enough to obtain from the best sculpture of the day “a bond in stone and everduring bronze” to perpetuate their memories. In the Leichenhaus (dead house) adjoining may be seen through glass windows the bodies which are customarily deposited there for three days before burial. They are placed in their coffins in easy and natural postures, they are arrayed as usual in life, and flowers and other accessories are so arranged as to make them appear as if asleep. There is a similar Leichenhaus in Frankfort, and the primary object is the same in both, to obviate the danger of premature interment. On one of the fingers of each corpse is placed a ring attached to a light cord connected with a bell in the room of the warder, who is always on the watch.
Among the various modes of burial on the continent, none are so revolting to an Englishman or an American as the use of a common fosse, or pit. In one of the cemeteries of Naples is a series of 365 pits, one for every day of the year. One pit is opened each day, the dead of that day are laid in it, and it is filled with earth containing a large quantity of lime. A year afterwards this earth with its decomposed contents is removed, and the pit placed in readiness for the annual repetition of the burial of new bodies with fresh earth and fresh lime.
In the basement of the Capuchin Church in Rome is the charnel-house or cemetery of the Friars. It is divided into recesses, and the walls are festooned with the bones of disinterred Capuchins, arranged in fanciful forms, such as stars, crosses, crowns, shields, lamps, etc. The arrangement of the bones is ingenious, and more grotesque than horrible. Here and there, in niches, entire skeletons are placed in various attitudes. At the death of a friar the body is deposited in the oldest grave, and the bones of the former occupant are removed to the ossuarium, and prepared for the additional decoration of the vaults. In the Church of St. Ursula, in Cologne, are preserved the bones of eleven thousand virgins—more or less—who were barbarously massacred by the Huns because they refused to break the vows of chastity. These osseous relics are piled on shelves built in the walls for their accommodation and display. It is hard for an American, whether churchman or heretic, to comprehend the meaning or purpose or taste of such a strange anatomical exhibition.
There are Americans who go to Nuremberg without visiting the Johannisfriedhof, the church-yard of St. John. They miss many things worth seeing in this extremely quaint spot,—monumental designs, intricate iron work, bronze tablets on horizontal stones, which have no parallels or imitations elsewhere. They miss the “Emigravit,” etc. inscribed on the tombstone of Albert Dürer, and referred to by Mr. Longfellow in his lines descriptive of Nuremberg; they miss the strange monument to Hans Sachs; and they miss the mortuary chapel of the Holzschuher family which contains some of the finest works of the old sculptor, Adam Krafft. But people have differing tastes, and those of our countrymen referred to as not caring a fig for the queer bronze bas-reliefs in the church-yard of St. John, make it a point to include the catacombs of Rome and Paris within the range of their visits in these cities. In Paris it is much easier to trace the course of the catacombs on charts, to learn above ground the history of the transformation of the old quarries into subterranean charnel-houses, and to accept the statistical statement that three millions of skeletons are deposited there, without verifying the assertion by descending into the excavations and counting the bones. Faithfully “doing” the crypts of the churches in Paris, as elsewhere, is fatiguing enough. It is well to stand by the coffin of Victor Hugo in the lower recesses of the Pantheon, or on the spot in the Chapelle Expiatoire, where Marie Antoinette was originally buried, or near the ashes of the celebrities in the undercroft of St. Denis, but fatigue eventually draws the line.
There is one crypt of which no one ever tires, no matter how frequent the visits may be repeated. It is directly beneath the gilded dome of the Invalides, and holds the porphyry monolith in which repose the remains of Napoleon. Around the top of the portico is a circular marble balustrade over which the visitor looks down at the colossal bronze caryatides and marble statues which surround the tomb. The height of the dome is 323 feet. Through an ingenious arrangement of an upper window a flood of golden light is made to strike the high altar near the tomb in a singularly effective manner. As one glances from that altar to the magnificent frescoes around, from the splendid statuary to the glories of the torn and faded battle flags, from the mosaic laurels on the floor of the crypt to the grandeur of the dome, he feels that this is art’s supreme effort to make the resting place of the warrior at once the most beautiful and the most majestic tomb that has ever been reared to a mortal.
What a broad contrast between this imperial magnificence and the simple and quiet grave of Thomas Gray in the church-yard of Stoke Pogis, the scene of his immortal Elegy; or the ivy-covered tomb of Walter Scott in a sheltered nook of the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey; or the vault in the chancel of the parish church on the bank of the Avon, at Stratford, which holds the ashes of William Shakespeare. Visitors to Naples hesitate to climb the steep rocks near the Grotto of Posilipo, to visit the alleged tomb of Virgil, because authoritative writers doubt whether the author of the Æneid was buried there. But we know that in that quiet spot at the southeast corner of the venerable church of Stoke manor, Gray was buried, and we are told that on the evening before the capture of Quebec and the overthrow of the French dominion in Canada, General Wolfe said, “I would rather be the author of the Elegy in a Country Church-yard than to win a victory to-morrow.” And we might ask, who would not rather be the author of Hamlet than the victor of Austerlitz or Marengo?
“Such graves as theirs are pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined;
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.”
What Santa Croce is to Italy, what the Valhalla is to Germany, what the Pantheon was intended to be to France—the shrine of genius—Westminster Abbey is to England. Scores of kings and queens are buried in this National Sanctuary, but though it is still the place for the coronation, it is no longer the place for the interment of royalty. It has become the sepulchre of the kings of great thought and of grand action. Says Dean Stanley in his Historical Memorials of the Abbey, “As the Council of the nation and the Courts of Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very Throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed into the sepulchre of the Kings and surrounded them as with a guard of honor after their death.... Let those who are inclined to contrast the placid dignity of our recumbent Kings with Chatham gesticulating from the Northern Transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakespeare leaning on his column in Poets’ Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the Chapel of St. John, look upon them as in their different ways keeping guard over the shrine of our monarchy and our laws.”
The Abbey does not monopolize the ashes of England’s greatest dead. Many who were illustrious in arms, in arts, in song, in statesmanship, rest in another Valhalla, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Notwithstanding the passionate exclamation of Nelson, “A peerage, or Westminster Abbey,” he was buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s, and so, half a century later, was Wellington. But a mile to the eastward there is a burial place of far more curious interest to the student of English history. It is in the grounds of that gloomy aggregation of buildings, the Tower of London, the fortress, prison, and palace, which dates back to the Norman Conquest. In point of historic reminiscence there is not a more interesting, certainly not a sadder spot than the Chapel of St. Peter in the Tower. Here rest the distinguished victims of the remorseless axe,—Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, Essex, Somerset, Northumberland, and all the rest of noble martyrs who were beheaded near the Beauchamp Tower, a few yards from where their remains have mouldered to dust. Macaulay says of this burial place: “Death is there associated, not as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and church-yards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”
The Loved and Lost
“The loved and lost!” why do we call them lost?
Because we miss them from our outward road,
God’s unseen angel o’er our pathway crost
Looked on us all, and loving them the most,
Straightway relieved them from life’s weary load.
They are not lost; they are within the door
That shuts out loss and every hurtful thing—
With angels bright, and loved ones gone before,
In their Redeemer’s presence evermore,
And God himself their Lord, and Judge, and King.
And this we call a loss! O selfish sorrow
Of selfish hearts! O we of little faith!
Let us look round, some argument to borrow,
Why we in patience should await the morrow,
That surely must succeed the night of death.
Aye, look upon this dreary, desert path,
The thorns and thistles wheresoe’r we turn;
What trials and what tears, what wrongs and wrath,
What struggles and what strife the journey hath!
They have escaped from these; and lo! we mourn.
Ask the poor sailor, when the wreck is done,
Who, with his treasure, strove the shore to reach,
While with the raging waves he battled on,
Was it not joy, where every joy seemed gone,
To see his loved ones landed on the beach?
A poor wayfarer, leading by the hand
A little child, had halted by the well
To wash from off her feet the clinging sand,
And tell the tired boy of that bright land
Where, this long journey past, they longed to dwell,
When lo! the Lord, who many mansions had,
Drew near and looked upon the suffering twain,
Then pitying, spake, “Give me the little lad;
In strength renewed, and glorious beauty clad,
I’ll bring him with me when I come again.”
Did she make answer selfishly and wrong—
“Nay, but the woes I feel he too must share!”
Or, rather bursting into grateful song,
She went her way rejoicing and made strong
To struggle on, since he was freed from care.
We will do likewise. Death hath made no breach
In love and sympathy, in hope and trust;
No outward sigh or sound our ears can reach,
But there’s an inward, spiritual speech,
That greets us still, though mortal tongues be dust.
It bids us do the work that they laid down—
Take up the song where they broke off the strain;
So journeying till we reach the heavenly town,
Where are laid up our treasures and our crown,
And our lost, loved ones will be found again.
At Last
When on my day of life the night is falling,
And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,
I hear far voices out of darkness calling
My feet to paths unknown.
Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant,
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;
O love divine, O helper ever present,
Be thou my strength and stay!
Be near me when all else is from me drifting,
Earth, sky, home’s picture, days of shade and shine,
And kindly faces to my own uplifting
The love which answers mine.
I have but Thee, O Father! Let Thy Spirit
Be with me then to comfort and uphold;
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm, I merit,
Nor street of shining gold.
Suffice it if—my good and ill unreckoned,
And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace—
I find myself by hands familiar beckoned
Unto my fitting place;
Some humble door among Thy many mansions,
Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease,
And flows fore’er through heaven’s green expansions
The river of Thy peace.
There from the music round about me stealing,
I fain would learn the new and holy song,
And find, at last, beneath Thy trees of healing,
The life for which I long.
John Greenleaf Whittier.
Auld Lang Syne
Under this title, though sometimes called a “hymn of comfort,” Rev. John W. Chadwick wrote the following lines for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his church:
It singeth low in every heart,
We hear it each and all—
A song of those who answer not,
Forever we may call;
They throng the silence of the breast,
We see them as of yore—
The kind, the brave, the true, the sweet
Who walk with us no more.
’Tis hard to take the burden up
When these have laid it down;
They brightened all the joy of life,
They softened every frown;
But oh, ’tis good to think of them,
When we are troubled sore!
Thanks be to God that such have been,
Although they are no more!
More homelike seems the vast unknown,
Since they have entered there;
To follow them were not so hard,
Wherever they may fare;
They cannot be where God is not,
On any sea or shore;
Whate’er betides, Thy love abides,
Our God, for evermore.
In a Rose Garden
Under the above title, John Bennett, of Charleston, S. C., wrote the following verses:
A hundred years from now, dear heart,
We will not care at all;
It will not matter then a whit,
The honey or the gall.
The Summer days that we have known
Will all forgotten be and flown;
The garden will be overgrown
Where now the roses fall.
A hundred years from now, dear heart,
We will not mind the pain;
The throbbing, crimson tide of life
Will not have left a stain.
The song we sing together, dear,
The dream we dream together here,
Will mean no more than means a tear
Amid a Summer rain.
A hundred years from now, dear heart,
The grief will all be o’er;
The sea of care will surge in vain
Upon a careless shore.
These glasses we turn down to-day,
Here at the parting of the way,
We shall be wineless then as they,
And will not mind it more.
A hundred years from now, dear heart,
We’ll neither know nor care
What came of all life’s bitterness,
Or followed love’s despair.
Then fill the glasses up again,
And kiss me through the rose-leaf rain;
We’ll build one castle more in Spain
And dream one more dream there.
“Now I Lay Me”
The Mothers’ Club, which is revolutionizing the training of children, wants a revision of the child’s evening prayer which is in universal use. A grandmother relates a newly-awakened experience upon the occasion of a visit to her daughter. On the night after her arrival, the little five-year-old grandson insisted that his grandmother should put him to bed. When he was ready to be tucked in, he repeated the Lord’s Prayer, but when asked to follow it with “Now I lay me down to sleep,” she found that he had never learned it. On asking her daughter why, the child’s mother replied: “Why, mother dear, that belongs to the past, like teaching children to kneel, and many other things. Do we want our children to kneel when they ask us for anything? The Mothers’ Club has taught us that ‘Now I lay me’ is highly objectionable, with the suggestion in the line, ‘if I should die before I wake.’ How cruel to implant such a thought in the child’s mind! I remember too well the long hours I have lain awake lest I should die in my sleep. The model parent of to-day has advanced beyond the convictions of the model parent of yesterday, when to impress upon a child a fear of death and to keep in his remembrance that he must surely die was the duty of every good father and mother.
“Think of the funerals children were made to attend when you were a child—the funeral selections of the old-school readers, the horrible gloom that fell upon a home whenever death crossed the threshold, the clocks stopped, the pictures covered, or turned to the wall, and all the rest. Perhaps the fulfilment of the promise ‘There shall be no more death,’ is nearer than many suppose; for what is death when robbed of the fear of it—that fear which has been a positive cult for centuries? I, for one, believe that the blessed day is coming when to die will be simply passing on, and, outside of the circle of the dear ones of the departed, it will be almost ‘without observation.’ Certainly there will be a welcome absence of funeral pageants, the complete annihilation of the ashes after cremation, doing away in time with sepulchral urns and chapels for their preservation. Memorial monuments will then be in some form contributing to the world’s betterment. The wearing of mourning will be a thing of the past, and that blemish on many a fair rural landscape, the neglected old graveyard, will have disappeared. Funeral processions will no more go about the streets.”
When the old-fashioned grandmother recovered somewhat from her amazement at such a line of argument, she ventured to suggest a revision to avoid the condemnation of the Mothers’ Club. So now the little fellow is saying:
Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep;
When in the morning light I wake,
Lead Thou my feet, that I may take
The path of love for Thy dear sake.
A call in the New York Evening Post for a Child’s Morning Prayer brought several responses, among which are the following:
I.
My thanks, my God, I give to Thee
That I another morning see;
This day into Thy keeping take
My soul, my all, for Jesus sake.
II.
Father, keep me all the day,
While I work or while I play;
Make me feel and do what’s right
’Till I lay me down at night.
III.
Be with me, Lord, all through this day,
Both in my work and in my play,
That I by word and deed may be
Worthy of love, of Heaven, and Thee.
John Quincy Adams, “the old man eloquent,” said at the close of fifty years of crowded public life, beginning in 1798 and ending with his death in 1848, that he had never retired at night without repeating the little prayer that his mother taught him, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He further said it had been his practice to spend an hour each day in reading the Holy Scriptures.
Thanatopsis
Few poems have taken such remarkable hold of the public mind as Mr. Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” It has proved a source of profound consolation to many an anxious mind. Yet it has been subjected to criticism which implies misapprehension of its purport and purpose. The young writer evidently did not propose to deal with the strictly religious side of the matter. His poem is what is called “A View of Death.” It addresses itself to those whose fears may be excited by the prospect of the act of dying. It offers those consolations which are appropriate to such a consideration of a particular theme. It is an expansion of the old idea that “it is as natural to die as to live.” It deals with death as a change pertinent to the human constitution, and to be encountered with philosophical resignation. Any distinct recognition of the life to come would have been foreign to its purpose. It must be read with a full recollection that its author was a believer in the blessings and glories of the future state, though his immediate purpose was to reassure those who regard the end of this life with unmanly timidity.
At the same time there is a suggestion of faith in the future which is an essential part of the poem. The reader is exhorted to live so wisely that when his summons comes he may approach the grave “sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust.” There may be those who find in these words only an exhortation to a dignified acquiescence in the inevitable; but considering that they were written by one who had been trained in the principles of Christianity, they were probably suggested to his mind by the general belief of mankind in immortality.
Thanatopsis has been misunderstood because of its entire freedom from hackneyed common-places. Death is most frequently treated by Christian writers from a distinctly Christian point of view. This is natural, and leaves no ground for disapprobation. There is no reason, however, why it should not be also philosophically considered, as it has been, indeed, by several eminent religious writers, and as it is occasionally in the Holy Scriptures themselves.
This beautiful poem is in no need of extenuation or excuse. The poet was writing upon the mortality, not the immortality of man. He took away no genuine religious consolations—he simply offered others which are not to be disregarded because they are almost entirely intellectual.
Immortality
In connection with the foregoing remarks, it is well to quote the following passage from Mr. Bryant’s poem. “Flood of Years”:
So they pass
From stage to stage along the shining course
Of that fair river broadened like a sea.
As its smooth eddies curl along their way,
They bring old friends together; hands are clasped
In joy unspeakable; the mother’s arms
Are again folded round the child she loved
And lost. Old sorrows are forgotten now
Or but remembered to make sweet the hour
That overpays them; wounded hearts that bled
Or broke are healed forever.
A gentleman who had been sorely bereaved was so struck by the unquestioning faith in immortality here expressed, that he wrote to Mr. Bryant, asking if the lines were to be understood as a statement of his own belief. Mr. Bryant instantly replied in the following note:
Cummington, Mass., Aug. 10, 1876.
Certainly I believe all that is said in the lines you have quoted. If I had not, I could not have written them. I believe in the everlasting life of the soul; and it seems to me that immortality would be but an imperfect gift without the recognition in the life to come of those who are dear to us here.
W. C. Bryant.
M. Guizot’s Confession of Faith
In the Christianisme du XIX. Siècle the following extract from M. Guizot’s will is printed:
“I die in the bosom of the Reformed Christian Church of France, in which I was born, and in which I congratulate myself on having been born. In remaining attached to her, I have always exercised that liberty of conscience which she allows to her adherents in their relations with God, and which she invoked for her own basis. I have inquired, I have doubted; I have believed in the sufficiency of the human mind to resolve the problems presented to it by the universe and by man, and in the power of the human will to govern man’s life in accordance with its law and its moral purpose. After having lived, acted, and reflected long, I have remained, and still remain, convinced that neither the universe nor man suffice either to explain or to govern themselves naturally by the mere force of fixed laws to which they are subject, and of human wills that are brought into play. It is my profound faith that God, who created the universe and man, governs, upholds, or modifies them either by general, and, as we may say, natural laws, or by special and, as we call them, supernatural acts, emanating, as do also the general laws, from His perfect and free wisdom and His infinite power, which it is given to us to acknowledge in their effects, but forbidden to understand in their essence and design. Thus I have returned to the convictions in which I was cradled. Still firmly attached to reason and liberty, which I have received from God, and which are my honor and my right in this world, though I have returned to feel myself a child under the hand of God, sincerely resigned to my large share of weakness and ignorance, I believe in God, and adore Him without seeking to comprehend Him. I recognize Him present and at work not only in the fixed system of the universe and in the inner life of the soul, but also in the history of human society, specially in the Old and New Testaments,—monuments of revelation and Divine action, by the mediation and sacrifice of our Saviour Jesus Christ for the salvation of the human race. I bow myself before the mysteries of the Bible and the Gospel, and I stand aloof from the discussion and the scientific solution by which men have tried to explain them. I trust that God will allow me to call myself a Christian; and I am convinced that in the light on which I am about to enter, we shall see clearly the purely human origin and the vanity of the greater part of our discussions here below on Divine things.”
Thiers’s Faith
The political testament of Thiers commences thus: “Faith in an immense and incomprehensible God has not left me for a moment of my life, and I wish it to be my first thought now while I turn my mind towards my end. I have always denied a personal God, a revenger endowed with all the vain splendors, and subject to the miserable passions of humanity. But I prostrate myself, confused by my littleness, before the immense uncreated cause of the Cosmos, and I confide in that provident and immutable justice which I see diffused and dominant through the whole creation.”
Patrick Henry’s Legacy
Patrick Henry left in his will the following important message:
“I have now disposed of all my property to my family; there is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had that, and I had not given them one shilling, they would be rich, and if they had not that, and I had given them all the world, they would be poor.”
Goethe’s Last Words
These are said to have been “Mehr Licht!” (more light), and they are often quoted as if they were regarded as worthy of a philosopher and great writer. They are commonly looked upon as having reference to increased enlightenment of the mind and soul only, which we must, or should, all of us desire and long for. Probably Goethe had nothing more in his mind than plain ordinary physical light. On the near approach of death, light, which in the case of old people has been for years gradually producing less and less impression on the sensorium, ceases, in many cases, to produce more than the faintest impression, and so the dying person imagines himself to be in the dark, and calls out for more light. And this, most likely, was the case with Goethe.
A Rational View
Here is a passage from the last letter traced by the hands of George Sand, which is singularly like to a saying of Goethe on his death-bed: “I am not one of those who shrink from submission to a great law and rebel against the end of universal life.” Is it not told of the great German that he broke a long silence by this wise and consolatory utterance: “After all, this death is so general a thing, it cannot be an evil thing.”
Avoidance
Dr. Charles F. Deems, the genial pastor of the Church of the Strangers, New York City, on reaching his seventieth birthday, thus briefly gave out the secret of his successful and happy life:
The world is wide
In time and tide,
And God is guide,
Then—do not hurry.
That man is blest
Who does his best
And leaves the rest,
Then—do not worry.
A Scene at Old Hickory’s Death-bed
Mrs. Wilcox was present at General Jackson’s death, one bright and beautiful Sabbath morning in the June of 1845, and she described it as a scene never to be forgotten. He bade them all adieu in the tenderest terms, and enjoined them, old and young, white and black, to meet him in heaven. All were in tears, and when he had breathed his last the outburst of grief was irrepressible. The congregation at the little Presbyterian Church on the plantation, which the general had built to gratify his deceased wife, the morning service over, came flocking to the mansion as his eyes were closing, and added their bewailment to the general sorrow.
Shortly after this mournful event Mrs. Wilcox encountered an old servant in the kitchen, who was sobbing as though her heart would break. “Ole missus is gone,” she brokenly said to the child, “and now ole massa’s gone; dey’s all gone, and dey was our best frens. An ole massa, not satisfied teachin’ us how to live, has now teached us how to die!”
The poor, unlettered creature did not know that she was paraphrasing one of the most beautiful passages in Tickell’s elegy upon the “Death of Addison”:
“He taught us how to live, and (oh, too high
The price for knowledge!) taught us how to die.”
Imperator Augustus
Is this the man by whose decree abide
The lives of countless nations, with the trace
Of fresh tears wet upon the hard, cold face?
He wept because a little child had died.
They set a marble image by his side,
A sculptured Eros, ready for the chase;
It wore the dead boy’s features, and the grace
Of pretty ways that were the old man’s pride.
And so he smiled, grown softer now, and tired
Of too much empire, and it seemed a joy
Fondly to stroke and pet the curly head,
The smooth, round curls so strongly like the dead,
To kiss the white lips of his marble boy,
And call by name his little heart’s-desired.
Mary Stuart’s Prayer
Of the English versions of the prayer of Mary, Queen of Scots, two of the best are as follows. The first is from Swinburne’s tragedy, “Mary Stuart”:
O Lord, my God,
I have trusted in Thee;
O Jesu, my dearest One,
Now set me free.
In prison’s oppression,
In sorrow’s obsession,
I weary for Thee.
With sighing and crying,
Bowed down in dying.
I adore Thee, I implore Thee, set me free.
The next has been attributed to Denis Florence McCarthy, an Irish poet:
Lord God, all my hope is
In Thee, only Thee!
O Jesu, my Saviour,
Now liberate me!
In chains that have bound me,
In pains that surround me,
Still longing for Thee;
Here kneeling, appealing,
My misery feeling,
Adoring, imploring,
Oh, liberate me!
Into the World and Out
Into the world he looked with sweet surprise.
The children laughed so when they saw his eyes.
Into the world a rosy hand in doubt
He reached;—a pale hand took the rosebud out.
“And that was all,—quite all?” Ho, surely! But
The children cried so when his eyes were shut.
Patientia
Toil on, O troubled brain,
With anxious thoughts and busy scenes opprest,
Ere long release shall reach thee. A brief pain!
Then—rest!
Watch still, O heavy eyes,
A little longer must ye vigil keep;
And lo! your lids shall close at morning’s rise
In sleep.
Throb yet, O aching heart,
Still pulse the flagging current without cease;
When you a few hours more have played your part,
Comes Peace.
Bear up, then, weary soul!
Short is the path remaining to be trod—
Lay down the fleshy shroud and touch the goal—
Then—God!
Tom. Hood.
A friend of John Adams, our second President, called upon him one day towards the close of his life, to inquire after his health. “I am not well,” he replied; “I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement, open to the winds, and broken in upon by the storms; and what is worse, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.”
Faith, Hope, and Love were questioned what they thought
Of future glory, which religion taught:
Now Faith believed it firmly to be true,
And Hope expected so to find it, too:
Love answered smiling with a conscious glow,
“Believe? Expect? I know it to be so.”
Mountford says in “Euthanasy”:
“Faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love. And in that there is all comfort for them that hope to meet again. Love! Why should we doubt it will have its objects? for that faith will have its, we are sure; and love is greater than faith. If there is a heaven for our faith, there are friends in it for our love. I have known those who have grown holy through thoughts of the dead. We are saved by hope, and some of us by the special hope of being with our friends again. So that if there is salvation by hope, our friends whom we so hope for we shall certainly have again. We are not to sorrow for the dead as those that have no hope; now this implies our knowing our friends hereafter; because our grief is for their having been taken from us, and not for their having been taken into happiness.”
Death
Death is the one consoler, true and tried;
The goal of life, the hope we last retain,
Which, like some rare elixir, charms our pain
And heartens us to march till eventide;
The streaks of morning which the clouds divide
Athwart the tempest, snow, and driving rain;
The inn toward which the wayworn travellers strain,
Certain to find rest there, whate’er betide:
An angel holding in his sovereign hand
Sleep, and the guerdon of ecstatic dreams,
That smooths the couch and shuts the weary eyes:
The prisoner’s key; the leper’s healing streams;
The beggar’s purse; the exile’s fatherland;
The open portico to unknown skies.
Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal.
The man hath reached the goal and won the prize,
Who lives with honor, and who calmly dies
With name unstained, in fond remembrance kept,
By friends, by kindred, and by country wept;
Blending, when life is but a faded spell,
An angel’s welcome with the world’s farewell!
Bronson Alcott rested his argument for immortality on the ground of the family affections. “Such strong ties,” he reasoned, “could not have been made merely to be broken.” Let us share his faith, and believe that they are not broken.