LAST WORDS.
Come, lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love--but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
--_Walt Whitman._
Gabriel Norris uttered the few reverent words that consigned the dust
of Cartice Doring to the purifying flames. This was his conclusion:
“‘No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.’ We all
understand that better, when in the presence of the voiceless dead,
than at any other time. Then it is that we feel our oneness most;
then do we come into more solemn touch with the great heart of all;
then, even when our hearts are breaking, we better understand the
infinite love that manifests in every event of our lives, even the last
mysterious one which takes us out of the sight of our fellow-men.
“Then it is that the problem of life confronts us with importunate
appeal, and demands from our bleeding hearts an answer.
“She whose still white form lies here, lived, aspired, suffered, joyed
a little perhaps, and learned a part of the great lesson whose book has
no end, worked side by side with us, and then passed out of our sight,
leaving only this perishable temple to return to its elements.
“Has she but passed through a door to array herself in new garments
on the other side, in a larger chamber, or has the unit of her
individuality melted back into the Universal ocean, as a drop of water
falls again into the sea from which it has been dipped?
“Does the heart that has groaned in anguish and throbbed with love find
the end of everything in dreamless oblivion? Or does it still throb on
somewhere out of our sight, but not out of the care of the divine love
that thought it into being?
“For her this great question was answered long before the illusion
we call death transferred her to a larger chamber. She _knew_ that
she should never die; that, as a unit, an individual, a soul, she was
indestructible, the heir of all the ages through all the ages.
“Communion of spirit? Do you sneer at it as an unsatisfactory, even if
a possible thing? What else have we here? We are spirit now as much as
we shall ever be, and all our communion with each other is spiritual,
for every act of our lives has a spiritual quality, and is but the
expression of spirit.
“The things we see are but fractions of that which we see not. We never
saw the soul to whose visible form we bid farewell for a time to-day.
We saw but its mask, its clay image. That which made its impress upon
us was the spirit. By means of what it said and did, by the flash of
kindness in the eye, by the pressure of the hand in sympathy, by all
the means great and small by which it expressed its good will and love
to others, it revealed itself. These are what we shall remember and
cherish.
“Life is not all ‘a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.’
It is an endless becoming.
“Let us work by every means in our power to educate the individual, to
develop the unit, the imperishable, never-dying unit, for this is the
secret of all improvement, all growth, all happiness. Only by growth
out of ignorance into knowledge can we come into our inheritance of
eternal good.
“Nothing is great in this world and nothing is small. I cannot say of
the soul whose transition we celebrate to-day that it was either, for
there is no distinction. It aspired, and that means much. It strove to
go up higher; and that striving will lift it into the fulness of light.
“That living, loving, truthful, beautiful spirit, has not gone back
to the sea of universal Being to lose its identity. There is no going
back. In that sea we live and move and have our being now, as well as
in the future, yet we remain individuals. The union with the one mind
toward which we are all moving is an harmonious ever-upward-tending
life, not an extinction of the individual. The school, the club, the
state are its prototypes here,--a blending of the many units in one
body, but the extinction of none.
“We sorrow, but not without hope. Our friend still lives. We shall find
her again.”
“I loved her,” said Gabriel Norris, as he sat with Lilla in the little
flat after all was over. “To be near her I came to New York. She never
knew; but now she knows. My love did not crave possession. I was happy
in loving. I am still happy in it. She lives and I love her. It is
enough.”
THE END.
Transcriber’s Notes
Errors in punctuation and spacing have been fixed.
Page 138: “as much as as any” changed to “as much as any”
Page 173: “defeat and humilation” changed to “defeat and humiliation”
Page 194: “would is queer” changed to “world is queer”
Page 302: “by the wall” changed to “by the well”
Page 306: “have a monoply of it. What idocy!” changed to “have a
monopoly of it. What idiocy!”
Page 311: “The animal knows” changed to “The animal known”