Mystery unfathomable of Death! Mystery unapproachable of God! Destined
it was, from the foundations of the world, that each mystery should make
war upon the other: once that the lesser mystery should swallow up for a
moment a _limbus_ of the greater; and that woe is past: once that the
greater mystery should swallow up for ever the whole vortex of the
lesser; and that glory is yet to come. After which man, that is the son
of God, shall lift up his eyes for ever, saying, 'Behold! these were two
mysteries; and one is not; and there is but one mystery that survives
for ever!'
If an eternity (Death supposed) is as vast as a star, yet the most
miserable of earthly blocks not four feet square will eclipse, masque,
hide it from centre to circumference. And so it really is. Incredible as
it might seem apart from experience, the dreadful reality of death is
utterly withdrawn from us because itself dwindles to an apparent mote,
and the perishing non-reality thickens into a darkness as massy as a
rock.
Great changes summon to great meditations. Daily we see the most joyous
of events take a colouring of solemnity from the mere relation in which
they stand to an uncertain future: the birth of a child, heir to the
greatest expectations, and welcomed clamorously by the sympathy of
myriads, speaks to the more reflecting in an undertone of monitory
sadness, were it only as a tribute to the frailty of human expectations:
and a marriage-day, of all human events the most lawfully festal, yet
needs something of effort to chase away the boding sadness which settles
unavoidably upon any new career; the promise is vague, but new hopes
have created new dangers, and responsibilities contracted perhaps with
rapture are charged with menace.
For every one of us, male or female, there is a year of crisis--a year
of solemn and conscious transition, a year in which the light-hearted
sense of the _irresponsible_ ceases to gild the heavenly dawn. A year
there is, settled by no law or usage, for me perhaps the eighteenth, for
you the seventeenth, for another the nineteenth, within the gates of
which, underneath the gloomy archway of which, sits a phantom of
yourself.
Turn a screw, tighten a linch-pin--which is not to disease, but perhaps
to exalt, the mighty machinery of the brain--and the Infinities appear,
before which the tranquillity of man unsettles, the gracious forms of
life depart, and the ghostly enters. So profoundly is this true, that
oftentimes I have said of my own tremendous experience in this
region--destined too certainly, I fear, finally to swallow up intellect
and the life of life in the heart, unless God of His mercy fetches me
away by some sudden death--that death, considered as an entrance to this
ghostly world, is but a postern-gate by comparison with the
heaven-aspiring vestibule through which this world of the Infinite
introduces the ghostly world.
Time, if it does not diminish grief, alters its character. At first we
stretch out our hands in very blindness of heart, as if trying to draw
back again those whom we have lost. But, after a season, when the
impotence of such efforts has become too sensibly felt, finding that
they will not come back to us, a strange fascination arises which yearns
after some mode of going to _them_. There is a gulf fixed which
childhood rarely can pass. But we link our wishes with whatsoever would
gently waft us over. We stretch out our hands, and say, 'Sister, lend us
thy help, and plead for us with God, that we may pass over without much
agony.'
The joy of an infant, or joy-generation, without significance to an
unprofound and common mind--how strange to see the excess of pathos in
that; yet men of any (or at least of much) sensibility see in this a
transpicuous masque for another form, viz., the eternal ground of sorrow
in all human hearts. This, by the way, in an essay on William
Wordsworth, should be noticed as the charm of his poetry; and the note
differential, in fact. At least, I know not of any former poet who has
so systematically sought his sadness in the very luxury of joy. Thus, in
the 'Two April Mornings,' 'what a mortal freshness of dewy radiance!
what an attraction of early summer! what a vision of roses in June! Yet
it is all transmuted to a purpose of sadness.'
Ah, reader, scorn not that which--whether you refuse it or not as the
reality of realities--is assuredly the reality of dreams, linking us to
a far vaster cycle, in which the love and the languishing, the ruin and
the horror, of this world are but moments--but elements in an eternal
circle. The cycle stretches from an East that is forgotten to a West
that is but conjectured. The mere fact of your own individual calamity
is a life; the tragedy is a nature; the hope is but as a dim augury
written on a flower.[5]
If the things that have fretted us had not some art for retiring into
secret oblivion, what a hell would life become! Now, understand how in
some nervous derangements this horror really takes place. Some things
that had sunk into utter forgetfulness, others that had faded into
visionary power, all rise as gray phantoms from the dust; the field of
our earthly combats that should by rights have settled into peace, is
all alive with hosts of resurrections--cavalries that sweep in gusty
charges--columns that thunder from afar--arms gleaming through clouds of
sulphur.
God takes care for the religion of little children wheresoever His
Christianity exists. Wheresoever there is a national Church established,
to which a child sees all his protectors resort; wheresoever he beholds
amongst earthly creatures whom most he honours prostrate in devotion
before these illimitable heavens, which fill to overflowing the total
capacities of his young adoring heart; wheresoever at intervals he
beholds the sleep of death, falling upon the men or women whom he has
seen--a depth stretching as far below his power to fathom as those
persons ascend beyond his powers to pursue--God speaks to their hearts
by dreams and their tumultuous grandeurs. Even by solitude does God
speak to little children, when made vocal by the services of
Christianity, as also he does by darkness wheresoever it is peopled
with visions of His almighty power. For a pagan child, for a Greek
child, solitude was nothing; for a Christian child it is made the power
of God, and the hieroglyphic of His most distant truth. The solitude in
life is deep for the millions who have none to love them, and deep for
those who suffer by secret and incommunicable woe and have none to pity
them. Thus, be you assured that though infancy talks least of that which
slumbers deepest, it yet rests in its own transcendent solitude. But
infancy, you say, talks surely most of that which is uppermost in its
heart. Yes, doubtless of that which is uppermost, but not at all of that
which slumbers below the foundations of its heart.
[And then follows a suggestion to put in a note:]
I except one case, the case of any child who is marked for death by
organic disease, and knows it. In such cases the creature is
changed--that which would have been unchildlike ceases to offend, for a
new character is forming.