“To-morrow he repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky;”
but man lieth down, and riseth not again till the heavens are no more. Never again will he whose “Meditations” are now before us, lift up the light of his countenance upon us.
We need not say we look upon him, as a great man, as a good man, as a beloved man,—quis desiderio sit pudor tam cari capitis? We cannot now go very curiously to work, to scrutinize the composition of his character,—we cannot take that large, free, genial nature to pieces, and weigh this and measure that, and sum up and pronounce; we are too near as yet to him, and to his loss, he is too dear to us to be so handled. “His death,” to use the pathetic words of Hartley Coleridge, “is a recent sorrow; his image still lives in eyes that weep for him.” The prevailing feeling is,—He is gone—“abiit ad plures—he has gone over to the majority, he has joined the famous nations of the dead.”
It is no small loss to the world, when one of its master spirits—one of its great lights—a king among the nations—leaves it. A sun is extinguished; a great attractive, regulating power is withdrawn. For though it be a common, it is also a natural thought, to compare a great man to the sun; it is in many respects significant. Like the sun, he rules his day, and he is “for a sign and for seasons, and for days and for years;” he enlightens, quickens, attracts, and leads after him his host—his generation.
To pursue our image. When the sun sets to us, he rises elsewhere—he goes on rejoicing, like a strong man, running his race. So does a great man: when he leaves us and our concerns—he rises elsewhere; and we may reasonably suppose that one who has in this world played a great part in its greatest histories—who has through a long life been preëminent for promoting the good of men and the glory of God—will be looked upon with keen interest, when he joins the company of the immortals. They must have heard of his fame; they may in their ways have seen and helped him already.
Every one must have trembled when reading that passage in Isaiah, in which Hell is described as moved to meet Lucifer at his coming: there is not in human language anything more sublime in conception, more exquisite in expression; it has on it the light of the terrible crystal. But may we not reverse the scene? May we not imagine, when a great and good man—a son of the morning—enters on his rest, that Heaven would move itself to meet him at his coming? That it would stir up its dead, even all the chief ones of the earth, and that the kings of the nations would arise each one from his throne to welcome their brother? that those who saw him would “narrowly consider him,” and say, “is this he who moved nations, enlightened and bettered his fellows, and whom the great Taskmaster welcomes with ‘Well done!’”
We cannot help following him, whose loss we now mourn, into that region, and figuring to ourselves his great, childlike spirit, when that unspeakable scene bursts upon his view, when, as by some inward, instant sense, he is conscious of God—of the immediate presence of the All-seeing Unseen; when he beholds “His honorable, true, and only Son,” face to face, enshrined in “that glorious form, that light unsufferable, and that far-beaming blaze of majesty,” that brightness of His glory, that express image of His person; when he is admitted into the goodly fellowship of the apostles—the glorious company of the prophets—the noble army of martyrs—the general assembly of just men—and beholds with his loving eyes the myriads of “little ones,” outnumbering their elders as the dust of stars with which the galaxy is filled exceeds in multitude the hosts of heaven.
What a change! death the gate of life—a second birth, in the twinkling of an eye: this moment, weak, fearful, in the amazement of death; the next, strong, joyful,—at rest,—all things new! To adopt his own words: all his life, up to the last, “knocking at a door not yet opened, with an earnest indefinite longing,—his very soul breaking for the longing,—drinking of water, and thirsting again”—and then—suddenly and at once-a door opened into heaven, and the Master heard saying, “Come in, and come up hither!” drinking of the river of life, clear as crystal, of which if a man drink he will never thirst,—being filled with all the fulness of God!