Oh God! what a difference throughout the whole of this various and
teeming earth a single DEATH can effect! Sky, sun, air, the eloquent
waters, the inspiring mountain-tops, the murmuring and glossy wood,
the very
Glory in the grass, and splendour in the flower,
do these hold over us an eternal spell? Are they as a part and property
of an unvarying course of nature? Have they aught which is unfailing,
steady--_same_ in its effect? Alas! their attraction is the creature
of an accident. One gap, invisible to all but ourself in the crowd and
turmoil of the world, and every thing is changed. In a single hour,
the whole process of thought, the whole ebb and flow of emotion, may be
revulsed for the rest of an existence. Nothing can ever seem to us as it
did: it is a blow upon the fine mechanism by which we think, and move,
and have our being--the pendulum vibrates aright no more--the dial hath
no account with time--the process goes on, but it knows no symmetry or
order;--it was a single stroke that marred it, but the harmony is gone
for ever!
And yet I often think that that shock which jarred on the mental,
renders yet softer the moral nature. A death that is connected with love
unites us by a thousand remembrances to all who have mourned: it builds
a bridge between the young and the old; it gives them in common the most
touching of human sympathies; it steals from nature its glory and its
exhilaration--not its tenderness. And what, perhaps, is better than all,
to mourn deeply for the death of another, loosens from ourself the petty
desire for, and the animal adherence to, life. We have gained the end of
the philosopher, and view, without shrinking, the coffin and the
pall.--_New Monthly Magazine._
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