We should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply
untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly,
if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends'
graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of
our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm
domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions
of the unfathomable heavens; finally,--if death were denied to us. Once
in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and
his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally
to the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his
happiness--five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy
in springtime, because _that_ is a season of hope--and rich with
phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth
can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the
heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried
aloud,--"Away, away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my
endless life I have found not, and shall not find!" He was unhappy at
the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts: for love
is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another.
He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and
ejaculated forever in his heart,--"So then I am parted from you to all
eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above,
below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust
and ashes." He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of
Truth--and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to
them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be
thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye
directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an
answer!
IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COARSER
REALITIES OF LIFE.
Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher
illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in
the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling
landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom
the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!