This hour is mine: if for the next I care,
I grow too wide,
And do crusade upon death’s side:
For death each hour environs and surrounds.
He that would know
And care for future chances, cannot go
Unto those grounds,
But thro’ a churchyard which them bounds.”
The assured knowledge of the exact minute of one’s death may be treated religiously as a privilege, after the manner of appeals by gaol-chaplains to condemned-cell criminals; as where the clergyman of the Tolbooth Church bade Wilson and Robertson, convicted Porteous rioters, not despair on account of the suddenness of the summons, “but rather to feel this comfort in their misery, that, though all who now [in that church] lifted the voice, or bent the knee in conjunction with them, lay under the same sentence of certain death, they only had the advantage of knowing the precise moment at which it should be executed upon them.” But how does Professor Henry Rogers treat the question, in its practical aspect, in his so-called “Vision about Prevision”? The seer, or foreseer, in that fantasiestück, when asked, concerning those who consult him as to the future, whether some at least do not wish to know the hour of their death—that they may duly prepare for it? answers, “That least of all. Not a soul will hear his tale told to the end; they won’t let us unveil to them the hour or the mode of their dissolution.... They prefer having a veil thrown over the closing scene of their life. Like other play-goers, they do not like death to be actually exhibited on the stage, and willingly let the curtain fall ere the catastrophe.” Well, but the seer himself: he at any rate is above that weakness: he at any rate has inquired into the secret of his end? “For what purpose?” is his reply: is not that knowledge the very misery of prisoners in the condemned cell? are they not accounted miserable precisely because they are to die just that day month? will not hundreds, who pity them for that very circumstance, in fact die before them? and yet are not these accounted happy in comparison, because they know it not?
“E’en the great shadow, Death, lost half its gloom