Nothing seems, at first sight, less interesting or less instructive, than a genealogical table, a mere register of names and dates. But such a passage as that which we have quoted—so picturesque, so suggestive, so touching, so dramatic—when it occurs in the midst of these dry records, throws out an electric light at every link in the chain of generations. Each of those names in the table is the memorial—perhaps the only memorial—of a human heart that once lived and loved; a heart that kept its steady pulsations through some certain period of time, and then ceased to beat and mouldered into dust. Each of those names is the memorial of an individual human life that had its joys and sorrows, its cares and burthens, its affections and hopes, its conflicts and achievements, its opportunities wasted or improved, and its hour of death. Each of those dates of "birth," "marriage," "death,"—O how significant! What a day was each of those dates to some human family, or to some circle of loving human hearts!
To read a genealogy then may be, to a thinking mind, like walking in a cemetery, and reading the inscriptions on the gravestones. As we read, we may say with the poet—
"To a mysteriously-consorted pair,
This place is consecrate—to Death and Life."
The presence of death drives the mind to thoughts of immortality. Memorials of the dead are memorials not of death only, but of life. They lived, and therefore they died; and as the mind thinks of the dead gathered to their fathers, it cannot but think of the unseen worlds which they inhabit. All these names are memorials of human spirits that have passed from time into eternity. Ready or unprepared, in youth or in maturity, in childhood or in old age, they went into eternity, as we are going.
"The nursling, and the tottering little one
Taken from air and sunshine when the rose
Of infancy first blooms upon his cheek;
The thinking, thoughtless schoolboy; the bold youth