Here is a little grey cockle-shell, lying beside me, which I gathered, the other evening, out of the dust of the Island of St. Helena; and a brightly-spotted snail-shell, from the thistly sands of Lido; and I want to set myself to draw these, and describe them, in peace.
‘Yes,’ all my friends say, ‘that is my business; why can’t I mind it, and be happy?’
Well, good friends, I would fain please you, and myself with you; and live here in my Venetian palace, luxurious; scrutinant of dome, cloud, and cockle-shell. I could even sell my books for not inconsiderable sums of money if I chose to bribe the reviewers, pay half of all I got to the booksellers, stick bills on the lamp-posts, and say nothing but what would please the Bishop of Peterborough.
I could say a great deal that would please him, and yet be very good and useful; I should like much again [[379]]to be on terms with my old publisher, and hear him telling me nice stories over our walnuts, this Christmas, after dividing his year’s spoil with me in Christmas charity. And little enough mind have I for any work, in this seventy-seventh year that’s coming of our glorious century, wider than I could find in the compass of my cockle-shell.
But alas! my prudent friends, little enough of all that I have a mind to may be permitted me. For this green tide that eddies by my threshold is full of floating corpses, and I must leave my dinner to bury them, since I cannot save; and put my cockle-shell in cap, and take my staff in hand, to seek an unincumbered shore. This green sea-tide!—yes, and if you knew it, your black and sulphurous tides also—Yarrow, and Teviot, and Clyde, and the stream, for ever now drumly and dark as it rolls on its way, at the ford of Melrose.
Yes, and the fair lakes and running waters in your English park pleasure-grounds,—nay, also the great and wide sea, that gnaws your cliffs,—yes, and Death, and Hell also, more cruel than cliff or sea; and a more neutral episcopal person than even my Lord of Peterborough[2] stands, level-barred balance in hand,—waiting (how long?) till the Sea shall give up the dead which are in it, and Death, and Hell, give up the dead which are in them. [[380]]
Have you ever thought of, or desired to know, the real meaning of that sign, seen with the human eyes of his soul by the disciple whom the Lord loved? Yes, of course you have! and what a grand and noble verse you always thought it! “And the Sea——” Softly, good friend,—I know you can say it off glibly and pompously enough, as you have heard it read a thousand times; but is it, then, merely a piece of pomp? mere drumming and trumpeting, to tell you—what might have been said in three words—that all the dead rose again, whether they had been bedridden, or drowned, or slain? If it means no more than that, is it not, to speak frankly, bombast, and even bad and half unintelligible bombast?—for what does ‘Death’ mean, as distinguished from the Sea,—the American lakes? or Hell as distinguished from Death,—a family vault instead of a grave?
But suppose it is not bombast, and does mean something that it would be well you should think of,—have you yet understood it,—much less, thought of it? Read the whole passage from the beginning: “I saw the Dead, small and great, stand before God. And the Books were opened;”—and so to the end.
‘Stand’ in renewed perfectness of body and soul—each redeemed from its own manner of Death.
For have not they each their own manner? As the seed by the drought, or the thorn,—so the soul by the soul’s hunger, and the soul’s pang;—athirst in the springless sand; choked in the return-wave of Edom; grasped by [[381]]the chasm of the earth: some, yet calling “out of the depths;” but some—“Thou didst blow with Thy wind, and the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the mighty waters.” But now the natural grave, in which the gentle saints resigned their perfect body to the dust, and perfect spirit to Him who gave it;—and now the wide sea of the world, that drifted with its weeds so many breasts that heaved but with the heaving deep;—and now the Death that overtook the lingering step, and closed the lustful eyes;—and now the Hell, that hid with its shade, and scourged with its agony; the fierce and foul spirits that had forced its gates in flesh:[3]—all these the Loved Apostle saw compelled to restore their ruin; and all these, their prey, stand once again, renewed, as their Maker made them, before their Maker. “And the Sea gave up the Dead which were in it, and Death, and Hell, the dead which were in them.”