Psalm xxiii. 4.
No good thing will He, from whom cometh every good gift, withhold from them that love Him, and that walk uprightly; least of all then His presence when most that presence is indispensable,—as a very present help in trouble. And when so indispensable as in the valley of the shadow of death—darkening more and more unto the perfect night? We must die alone. It is a truism, in its natural sense. But in what the devout mind refuses to call or consider a non-natural sense, the righteous hath companionship as well as hope in his death. He who can say, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, confines not his reliance to the range of green pastures and still waters, but extends it to the glooms of the grave and the swellings of Jordan. Not alone at the last, for the Good Shepherd knoweth His sheep, and is known of them. And how known? For one that will not let them want. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.”
Pascal said that the solitude of death was the bitterest pang of humanity; and because one must die alone, the end of life is its heaviest trial. Some Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, very French, have essayed, in their peculiar fashion, to elude the disaster, simply by dying in public. People in Paris died in public in the seventeenth century. Death, as Mr. Herman Merivale puts it, was but the last scene of the play, to be performed with a theatrical bow and exit. He shows us the young beauty, perishing of dissipation, who made her adieux to the world in appropriate costume and sentiments; and the worn-out statesman, who might not turn his face to the wall in peace, but was surrounded by a whole court in full dress, and talked on till his husky accents could no longer convey the last of his smart sayings to the listeners.[42] With all his fribbles and frivolities Horace Walpole was not quite Frenchified enough to willingly face death in a French hotel, with all its noise and excitement, “and, what would be still worse, exposed to receive all visits; for the French, you know,” he writes to Conway, “are never more in public than in the act of death. I am like animals, and love to hide myself when I am dying”—which refers to his periodical, and prolonged, and always perilous attacks of gout. “If,” says the author of “Life in the Sick-room,” “I could not trust my friends to save me from involuntary encroachment at the last, I had rather scoop myself a hole in the sand of the desert, and die alone, than be tended by the gentlest hands, and soothed by the most loving voices in the choicest chamber.” Wordsworth’s Marmaduke exclaims,—
“Give me a reason why the wisest thing
That the earth knows shall never choose to die,
But some one must be near to count his groans.
The wounded deer retires to solitude,
And dies in solitude: all things but man,
All die in solitude.”
Special note has been taken of the exceptional characteristic in the altogether exceptional career of the prophet Elijah, that, in his last hour, when he was on his way to a strange and unprecedented departure from this world—when the whirlwind and flame chariot were ready, he asked for no human companionship. “The bravest men are pardoned if one lingering feeling of human weakness clings to them at the last, and they desire a human eye resting on them—a human hand in theirs—a human presence. But Elijah would have rejected all. In harmony with the rest of his lonely severe character, he desired to meet his Creator alone.” One hears of such preferences now and then, in oddly constituted natures. Sir Walter Scott, in a letter to his sister-in-law, appears to indicate a disposition of this kind as prevalent in his father’s family. “Poor aunt Curle,” he tells her, “died like a Roman, or rather like one of the Sandy-Knowe bairns, the most stoical race I ever knew. She turned every one out of the room, and drew her last breath alone. So did my uncle, Captain Robert Scott, and several others of that family.” Affectation was so inherent in Chateaubriand’s confessions and professions, that one knows not how far genuine may have been his plea for what he calls the “necessity of isolation,” and its advantages in death as in life. “Any hand is good enough to reach us the glass of water that we call for in the fever of death. Ah! may that hand not be too dear to us!” The “necessity of isolation” reminds us of Keble’s query:—