WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING
THAT OF HER HUSBAND.
Sleep buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us
a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too
vast for this little earth.
I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed.
The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the
breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us
are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had
fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested
like mild evening suns in the azure ether.
Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course,
and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew
nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look
down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but
not forgotten you."
For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the
Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is,
that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so
powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their
lost beloved.
After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the
Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had
remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse
and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was
flowing; but _they_ had no spring.
Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children
dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the
pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes
are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion
of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom.
And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image
life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and
as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her
children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless
nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and
prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and
give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the
earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!"
And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him,
and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye,
tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings,
should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life,
an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted
spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on
the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars
and wounds and the whole body?
No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the
tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort
yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has
wounded, save He who now heals them."
THE BEAUTY OF DEATH IN THE
BLOOM OF YOUTH.
In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest
happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The
joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small;
like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The
higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as
yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a
dark-green bud.
With what other and what brighter radiance is the period of youth
encircled!--that heavenly time of our first friendship and our first
love,--of our first poem and our first philosophy,--of our first full
enjoyment of nature and music and the drama,--of our first castles in
the air, and our first vigorous training for active life. And this
period is not simply irrecoverable,--that is the case with all past
time,--but for the very reason that in its perfect bloom its only
office is to minister to the fruits it so beautifully enfolds, it is
the highest and the culminating period; for there is necessarily a
greater productive force present in the process than in the results of
development, in the flower of youth than in the ripeness of manhood. In
his more advanced years, one is seldom led to enter upon a new path of
knowledge or a higher moral life; but in his youth, one gives himself
up, with inextinguishable fire, to some system of philosophy, or some
total change in his moral life. It calls for more strength in a man to
be converted than to stand still.
As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the
probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the
best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for
that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by
acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. Great attainments,
experience, and skill are certainly the fruits of age and of labor; but
what are these things, compared with the ideal enjoyments which come of
the first sciences we study, when the tree of knowledge, grafted upon
the tree of life, puts forth its branches,--compared with the delight
with which the new truths of geometry, or of philosophy, or of any
favorite science new-born to us, fill the soul? For even in science,
however far its limits may be pushed, one is ever descending from the
height of the ideal to the vulgar level of reality.
Youth is the full moon, illumined by the magic light of the sun. Age is
the new moon, upon which the day-earth (life) throws a meagre light.