Alas! Where is the need of all this black parade? Is it not a reproach to Him, who, in his wisdom, appointed death to pass upon all men? Were the sentence confined to the human species, we might have more reason for these extravagant demonstrations of grief; but in every object around us we see inscribed the mysterious law of change. The very mountains crumble and decay with years; the great sea shrinks and grows again; the lofty forest tree, that has drank the dews of heaven, laughed in the sunlight, and shook its branches at a thousand storms, yields to the same inscrutable destiny, and bows its tall forehead to the dust.
Life lives upon death, and death reproduces life, through endless circles of being, from the proud tyrant man down to the blind worm his iron heel tramples in the earth. Then wherefore should we hang out this black banner for those who are beyond the laws of change and chance?
"Yea, they have finish'd:
For them there is no longer any future.
No evil hour knocks at their door
With tidings of mishap--far off are they,
Beyond desire or fear."
It is the dismal adjuncts of death which have invested it with those superstitious terrors that we would fain see removed. The gloom arising from these melancholy pageants forms a black cloud, whose dense shadow obscures the light of life to the living. And why, we ask, should death be invested with such horror? Death in itself is not dreadful; it is but the change of one mode of being for another--the breaking forth of the winged soul from its earthly chrysalis; or, as an old Latin poet has so happily described it--
"Thus life for ever runs its endless race,
Death as a line which but divides the space--