“Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art”—
and fell into the arms of the Friar to whom he was speaking; and these were his last words. Cummings had just spoken the words of Dumont in Jane Shore—
“Be witness for me, ye celestial hosts,
Such mercy and such pardon as my soul
Accords to thee and begs of heaven to show thee,
May such befall me at my latest hour”—
when he suddenly gasped, and was dead. Palmer, while enacting the part of the Stranger, having uttered the sentence in his rôle, “There is another and a better world,” dropped lifeless on the stage. In such instances Fate interpolates in the stereotyped performance a dread impromptu which must make us all feel what mysteries we are and by what mysteries enshrouded.
The morning of the 12th came, and the death of Edwin Forrest was at hand. In the early light, solitary in the privacy of his chamber, he who had no blood relative on earth, the last of his race, was summoned to give up his soul and take the unreturning road into the voiceless mystery. He who in the mimic scene had so often acted death was now to perform it in reality. Now he who in all his theatrical impersonations had been so democratic, was to be, in his closing and unwitnessed human impersonation, supremely democratic, both in the substance and in the manner of his performing. For this severing of the spirit from the flesh, this shrouded and mystic farewell of the soul to the world, is a part cast inevitably for every member of the family of man, and enacted under conditions essentially identical by all, from the emperor to the pauper. Perform or omit whatever else he may, every one must go through with this. Furthermore, in the enactment of it all artificial dialects of expression, all caste peculiarities of behavior, fall away; the profoundest vernacular language of universal nature alone comes to the surface, and the pallor of the face, the tremor of the limbs, the glazing of the eye, the gasp, the rattle, the long sigh, and the unbreakable silence,—are the same for all. Death knows neither politeness nor impoliteness, only truth. Now the hour was at hand whose coming and method had been foresignalled years ago, when, at Washington, an apoplectic clot hung the warning of its black flag in his brain. No visible spectators gathered to the sight, whatever invisible ones may have come. No lights were kindled, no music played, no bell rang, no curtain rose, no prompter spoke. But the august theatre of nature, crowded with the circulating ranks of existence, stood open for the performance of the most critical and solemn portion of a mortal destiny. And suddenly the startling command came. With a shudder of all the terrified instincts of the organism he sprang to the action. There was a sanguinary rush through the proscenium of the senses. The cerebral stage deluged in blood, the will instantly surrendered its private functions, all fleshly consciousness vanished, and that automatic procedure of nature, which, when not meddled with by individual volition, is infallible, took up the task. Then, step by step, point for point, phase on phase, he went through the enactment of his own death, in the minutest particulars from beginning to end, with a precision that was absolutely perfect, and a completeness that could never admit of a repetition. It was the greatest part, filled with the most boundless meaning, of all that he had ever sustained; and no critic could detect the slightest flaw in its representation.