“‘My Lord hath need of these flow’rets gay,’
The Reaper said, and smiled;
‘Dear tokens of the earth are they,
Where He was once a Child.’”
And how do you think the artist has represented that gentle Angel-Reaper? Actually as a hideous Skeleton with a lank scythe! So ingrained is that ghastly and loathsome idea of death in the common thought of men. Then think of all the impenetrable gloom with which we surround death in this Christian England in this nineteenth century; of the utter absence of hope or beauty (save for the glorious pæan of the service) in our obsequies. Listen, as soon as the happy, hopeful Christian has “fallen asleep,” to the manner in which we tell the news to the family of our village or town. Drop, drop, like melted lead falling, for a whole hour sometimes comes that dull monotony of gloom, TOLL, TOLL, TOLL, till the heart dies down into depression for the day.
Save that we know that that recurring note comes from the belfry of the peaceful little church that presides hopefully and holily over its gathering of sleepers—save for this, would there, I ask, be any thought but of dreariness in that dull ceaseless repetition of one desolate tone? Death is, indeed
always a grave and solemn thing, and it were well that a grave and solemn voice should announce its presence to the clustered or the scattered homes. But why change solemnity into despair? Why fill the air with nought but heavy gloom for a whole hour or half-hour? I would not say, in the words of Poe:—
“Avaunt! to-night my heart is light, no dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a pæan of old days!
Let no bell toll! lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note as it doth float up from the weeping earth.”
For there must be sadness here, if there be joy where the spirit has gone. Only let not the dark cloud be debarred from any the least silver lining. Something gentle, tender, and sweet, in accordance, so far as earth’s lamenting can accord, with the glory and rapture of the released one, would surely be better for the living than that slow prolonged numbering the beads of their own sorrow. I would have the bells rung, as for a wedding; only with a minute’s interval between each note. So the joy and the sorrow would each claim its share.
The early Christians used to speak of and commemorate the day of death, as “τὰ γενέθλια,” the birthday feast of the Dead. What a different way of putting things from our compassionate mention—not of the surviving, but of the dead. Poor so-and-so! How sad!—this, for the spirit, that we feel a good hope, is in Paradise! How the having it put before you in the just view—rather as an entering into true life, than a dying from it, casts a glow on what most seem to regard as nought but gloom. A most exquisite instance of such a beautiful putting of such a sharp Winter day to even a bereaved father and mother, I find in one of Archbishop Leighton’s heavenly letters. In what a different light must their loss, surely, have appeared to them, after its perusal.