Chapter XIV (3)

While in this conflict grave and responsible leaders grow factious--while men of purpose forget their march onward in side-skirmishes--while reformers lose sight of the imperishable quality of their cause, and talk of hopeless corruption and inevitable destruction--how do affairs appear to us, in virtue merely of our being out of the strife?

We see that large principles are more extensively agreed upon than ever before--more manifest to all eyes, from the very absence of a hero to work them, since they are every hour showing how irresistibly they are making their own way. We see that the tale of the multitude is told as it never was told before--their health, their minds and morals, pleaded for in a tone perfectly new in the world. We see that the dreadful sins and woes of society are the results of old causes, and that our generation has the honour of being responsible for their relief, while the disgrace of their existence belongs, certainly not to our time, and perhaps to none. We see that no spot of earth ever before contained such an amount of infallible resources as our own country at this day; so much knowledge, so much sense, so much vigour, foresight, and benevolence, or such an amount of external means. We see the progress of amelioration, silent but sure, as the shepherd on the upland sees in the valley the advance of a gush of sunshine from between two hills. He observes what the people below are too busy to mark: how the light attains now this object and now that--how it now embellishes yonder copse, and now gilds that stream, and now glances upon the roofs of the far-off hamlet--the signs and sounds of life quickening along its course. When we remember that this is the same sun that guided the first vessels of commerce over the sea--the same by whose light Magna Charta was signed in Runnymede--that shone in the eyes of Cromwell after Naseby fight--that rose on 800,000 free blacks in the West Indies on a certain August morning--and is now shining down into the dreariest recesses of the coal-mine, the prison, and the cellar--how can we doubt that darkness is to be chased away, and God’s sunshine to vivify, at last, the whole of our world?

Is it necessary, some may ask, to be sick, and apart, to see and believe these things? Events seem to show that for some--for many--sequestration from affairs is necessary to this end; for there are not a few who, in the hubbub of party, have let go their faith, and have not to this moment found it again. If there are some in the throng who can at once act and anticipate faithfully, we may thank God for the blessing. But they are sadly few.

I have said how clearly appears to us the fact and the reason of every man’s exaggerating at the moment the importance of the work under his hand. Not less clear is the ordination, as old and as continuous as human action, by which men fail, more or less, of obtaining their express objects, while all manner of unexpected good arises in a collateral way. It is usual to speak of the results of the labours of alchemists in this view, everybody seeing that while we still pick out our gold from the ground, we owe much to the alchemists that they never thought of. But the same is true of almost every object of human pursuit, and even of belief. No doubt we invalids keep up our likeness to our kind, in this respect, as far as we are able to act at all; but we have more time than others to contemplate the working of the plan on a large scale. Look at the projects, the discoveries, the quackeries of the day!

With regard to the projects, however, I am at present disposed to make one partial exception--to acknowledge, as far as I can at present see, one case of singularity. I mean with regard to the New Postage. The general rule proves true in one half of it, that many great and yet unascertained benefits are arising, of which the projector did not dream; so that a volume might be filled with anecdotes, curious to the spectator and delightful to the benevolent. But, thus far, it does not appear that any fallacy has mixed itself with the express expectations of the projector. I do not speak of the failure of his efforts to get his whole plan adopted. That will soon be a matter of small account--a disappointment and vexation gone by--a temporary trial of patience, forgotten except by the record. I mean that he has advanced no propositions which he does not seem perfectly able to prove, uttered no promises which do not appear certain to be fulfilled. This project is perhaps the noblest afloat in our country and time, considering the moral interests it involves. It is, perhaps, scarcely possible to exaggerate the force and extent of its civilising and humanising influences, especially in regard to its spreading the spirit of Home over all the occupations and interests of life, in defiance of the separating powers of distance and poverty; and it will be curious if this enterprise, besides keeping the school-child at his mother’s bosom, the apprentice, the governess, and the maid-servant, at their father’s hearth--and us sick or aged people entertained daily with the flowers, music, books, sentiment and news of the world we have left--should prove an exception to all others in performing all its express promises. At present, I own, this appears no matter of doubt.

As for the discoveries or quackeries of the time, (and who will undertake to say in what instances they are not, sooner or later, compounded?) how clear is the collateral good, whatever may be the express failure? Those who receive all the sayings of the Coryphæus of the phrenologists, and those who laugh at his maps of the mind and his so-called ethics, must both admit that much knowledge of the structure of the brain, much wise care of human health and faculties, has issued from the pursuit, for the benefit of man. This Mesmerism again: who believes that it could be revived, again and again, at intervals of centuries, if there were not something in it? Who looks back upon the mass of strange but authenticated historical narratives, which might be explained by this agent, and looks, at the same time, into our dense ignorance of the structure and functions of the nervous system, and will dare to say that there is nothing in it? Whatever quackery and imposture may be connected with it, however its pretensions may be falsified, it seems impossible but that some new insight must be obtained by its means, into the powers of our mysterious frame--some fixing down under actual cognizance, of flying and floating notions, full of awe, which have exercised the belief and courage of many wise, for many centuries.

After smiling over old books all our lives, on meeting with quaint assumptions of the Humoral pathology as true, while we supposed it exploded--behold it arising again! One cannot open a newspaper, scarcely a letter, without seeing something about the Water-cure; and grave doctors, who will listen to nothing the laity can say of anything new, (any more than they would tolerate the mention of the circulation of the blood in Harvey’s day,) now intimate that the profession are disposed to believe that there is more in the humoral pathology than was thought thirty years ago, though not so much as the water-curers presume. Is it not pretty certain, then, that something will come of this rage for the water-cure, (something more than ablution, temperance, and exercise,) though its professors must be embalmed as quacks in the literature of the time? Is there not still another operation of the same principle involved in the case? Are we not growing sensibly more merciful, more wisely humane towards empirics themselves, when they cease to be our oracles? Are we not learning, from their jumbled discoveries and failures, that empiricism itself is a social function, indispensable, made so by God, however ready we may be to bestow our cheap laughter upon it? To us retired observers of life there is too much of this easy mockery for our taste, or for the morals of society. Ours seems to be an age when it is to the credit of others, besides statesmen, that they can live and learn; and there is no getting on in our learning without empiricism. It is less wise than easy to ridicule its connection with non-essential modes and appearances prescribed or suggested by the passions, needs, or follies of the time. It is most wise, and should be easy, to have faith that the determining conditions of all experimental discovery will be ascertained in due season. If, meanwhile, we can obtain from the magnetisers any light as to any function of the nervous system, we may excuse them from the performance of some promised feats. If the Homœopathists can help us to any new principle of natural antagonism to disease, they may well abide the laugh which I am not aware that the serious of their number have ever provoked by any extreme and unsupported pretensions.

* * * * *

But at this rate, occupying this scope, I shall never have done. I might write on for every day of my life, and be no nearer the end of our speculations. Let what I have said go for specimens of our observation of life in two or three particulars. When I think of what I have seen with my own eyes from one back window, in the few years of my illness; of how indescribably clear to me are many truths of life from my observation of the doings of the tenants of a single row of houses; it seems to me scarcely necessary to see more than the smallest sample, in order to analyse life in its entireness. I could fill a volume--and an interesting one too--with a simple detail of what I have witnessed, as I said, from one back-window. But I must tell, nothing. These two or three little courts and gardens ought to be as sacred as any interior. Nothing of the spy shall mix itself with my relation to neighbours who have ever been kind to me. Suffice it, that if I saw no further into the world with the mental than with the bodily eye, I should be kept in a state of perpetual wonder, (of pleasing wonder, on the whole,) at the operation of the human heart and mind, in its most ordinary circumstances. Nothing can be more ordinary than the modes of life which I overlook, yet am I kept wide awake in my watch by ever new instances of the fulness of pleasure derivable from the scantiest sources; of the vividness of emotion excitable by the most trifling incidents; of the wonderful power pride has of pampering itself upon the most meagre food; and, above all, of the infinite ingenuity of human love. Nothing, perhaps, has impressed me so deeply as the clear view I have of almost all, if not quite the whole, of the suffering I have witnessed being the consequence of vice or ignorance. But when my heart has sickened at the sight, and at the thought of so much gratuitous pain, it has grown strong again in the reflection that, if unnecessary, this misery is temporary,--that the true ground of mourning would be if the pain were not from causes which are remediable. Then I cannot but look forward to the time when the bad training of children,--the petulancies of neighbours--the errors of the ménage--the irksome superstitions, and the seductions of intemperance, shall all have been annihilated by the spread of intelligence, while the mirth at the minutest jokes--the proud plucking of nosegays--the little neighbourly gifts, (less amusing hereafter, perhaps, in their taste)--the festal observances--the disinterested and refined acts of self-sacrifice and love, will remain as long as the human heart has mirth in it, or a humane complacency and self-respect,--as long as its essence is what it has ever been, “but a little lower than the angels.”

* * * * *

How is it possible to give an idea of what the gradual disclosure of the fates of individuals is to us? In reading chronicles, and the lighter kinds of history, we have all found ourselves eagerly watching the course of love and domestic life, and pausing over the winding up, at death, of the lot of personages whose mere names were all the interest we began with. To us, in the monotony of our lives, it seems as if other people’s lives slipped away with the rapidity with which we read a book, while the interest we feel is that of personal knowledge. It is as if Time himself were present unseen, whispering to us of a new kindled love,--of marriage, with all its details of “pomp and circumstance;” and then comes the deeper social interest,--the opening of a glimpse into the vista of new generations, while all around the other interests of life are transacting, and the children we knew at their parents’ knees are abroad in the world, acting for themselves, and putting a hand to the destinies of society.

Of all the announcements made in the silence of our solitude, none are so striking as those of deaths, familiar as the thought of death is to us, and natural as our own death would appear to ourselves, and to everybody. To present witnesses, and in the midst of the activity of life, the spectacle of death loses half its force. It is we who feel the awful beauty of it, when the great Recorder intimates to us that they who were strenuous in mutual conflict have lain down side by side; that to old age its infirmities matter no longer, as the body itself is surrendered; that the weary spirit of care is at rest, and that the most active affections and occupations of life have been brought to a sudden close. Many young and busy persons wish, as I used to wish, that Time would be prophet as well as watchman. On New Year’s Eves, such long to divine how many, and who of those they know, will be smitten and withdrawn during the coming year. We, in our solitude, do not desire to forestal the unrolling of the scroll. To ponder the register of the year’s deaths at its close, is enough for us, to whom our seclusion serves for all purposes of speculation. While we are waiting, every year conveys away before us the infant, (a new immortality created before our eyes); the busy citizen, or indispensable mother, (showing how much more important in the eye of God is it what we are than what we do;) the young maiden, full of sympathy, (perhaps for us,) and of hope; and the aged, full of years, but perhaps not less of life. Such is the register of every year at its close.

To us, whose whole life is sequestered,--who see nothing of the events of which we hear so much, or see them only as gleam or shadow passing along our prison-walls, there is something indescribably affecting in the act of regarding History, Life, and Speculation as one. All are enhanced to us by their melting into each other. History becomes like actual life; life becomes comprehensive as history, and abstract as speculation. Not only does human life, from the cradle to the grave, lie open to us, but the whole succession of generations, without the boundary line of the past being interposed; and with the very clouds of the future so thinned,--rendered so penetrable, as that we believe we discern the salient and bright points of the human destiny yet to be revealed.

* * * * *

It would be impossible to set down, within any moderate limits, notices of changes in the Modes of life,--modes arising from progressive civilisation, and deeply affecting morals;--but there is one branch of one great change, which I will mention, as it bears a relation to the morals of the sick-room.

We all know how the present action of our new civilisation works to the impairing of Privacy. As new discoveries are causing all-penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication work to reduce privacy much within its former limits. There are some limits, however, which ought to be preserved with vigilance and care, as indispensable, not only to comfort, but to some of the finest virtues and graces of mind and life.

It is to be hoped that the privacy of _vivâ voce_ conversation will ever remain sacred: but it is known that that which ought to be as holy, that of epistolary correspondence,--(the private conversation of distant friends,) is constantly and deliberately violated, where there are certain inducements to do so. The press works so diligently and beneficially for society at large, that there is a tendency to commit everything to it, on utilitarian considerations of a rather coarse kind: and the moment it can be made out that the publication of anything will and may do some ostensible good, the thing is published,--whatever considerations of a different or a higher sort may lie behind. If the people of note in society were inquired of, they would say that the privilege--the right--of privacy of epistolary correspondence now exists only for the obscure;--and for them, only till some person meets them whose zeal for the public good leads him to lay hold on all material by which anybody may be supposed likely to learn anything. As for people of note,--their letters are naturally preserved by the recipients: when the writer dies, these recipients are plied with entreaties and remonstrances,--placed in a position of cruel difficulty (as it is to many) between their delicacy of affection for the deceased, and the pain of being made responsible for intercepting his fame, and depriving society of the benefit of the disclosure of his living mind.

Under this state of things, what happens? Some destroy, through life, all the letters they receive, but those on business. Some, with an agonising heart, burn them after the writer’s death, to escape the requisitions of executors. Many, alas! resign their privilege of freedom of epistolary speech, and write no letters which any one would care to preserve for an hour. Some call in their own letters;--a painful process, both to writer and receivers. Of such as do not care what becomes of their letters, there is no need to say anything. Their feelings require no consideration, for their letters cannot be of a private,--nor, therefore, of the most valuable kind. The misery of the liability is in regard to letters of affection and confidence,--letters which the writer could no more bear to see again than to have notes taken of the out-pourings of his heart in an hour of confidence. It is too certain that many such letters are now never written which crave to be so: and it is much to be feared that some letters, purporting to be private, are written with a view to ultimate publication; and thus the receiver is insulted, or there is a sacrifice of honesty all round.

I do not see any probability of a dearth of biographies. I believe that there will always be interest enough in human life and character to secure a sufficiency of records of individuals:--that there will always be enough of persons whose letters are not of a very private kind,--always enough of provided and exceptional cases to serve society with a sufficiency of biography, of a duly analytical kind. But if I did not believe this,--if I believed that the choice lay between a sacrifice of the completest order of biography and that of the inviolability of private epistolary correspondence, I could not hesitate for a moment. I would keep the old and precious privacy,--the inestimable right of every one who has a friend and can write to him;--I would keep our written confidence from being made biographical material, as anxiously as I would keep our spoken conversation from being noted down for the good of society. I would keep the power of free speech under all the influences of life and fate,--and leave Biography to exist or perish.

And pretty sure it is of existence. It has, for its material, the life and actions of all men and women of note;--their printed and otherwise public writings and sayings;--the recollections of those who knew them; and, in no small number of cases, material which, however we may wonder at, we have only to take and be thankful for. A Doddridge keeps a copy of every letter or note he ever wrote, labelled and put by for posthumous use. A D’Arblay spends her last hours in elaborating her revelations of the transactions, private and public, of her day; and revises, for publication, the expressions of fondness and impulse, written to sisters and other intimates, long dead. A Rousseau here and there gives more. One way and another, the resources of biography are secure enough, without encroachment on a sacred process of intercourse. Biography will never fail. Would that we were all equally secure of a higher matter,--our right of freedom of epistolary speech!

“But when all are dead,--and nobody concerned remains to be hurt?” remonstrates one. The reply is, that as long as people of note, who love their friends, remain, there are some left to be concerned and injured.

“But,” says another, “would you object to do good, after your death, by your letters being published?” The reply is that, in the supposition, I see an enormous sacrifice of a higher and greater good to a lower and smaller. No letters, in any number and of any quality,--if they exhibited all the wisdom of Solomon, and all the graces of the Queen of Sheba, could do so much good as a single clear and strong protest against the preservation of strictly private letters for biographical material.

“But,” says another, “had you not better leave the matter to the discretion of survivors? Surely you can trust your executors;--surely you can trust the friends who will survive you.” The reply is--when this critical state of our morals is past, no doubt executors may be trusted about letters, as about other matters. But the very point of the case is that its morality is not yet ascertained by those who do not suffer under the liability, and have not fellow-feeling with those who do. My executors may very sincerely think it their duty to publish my most private letters,--and even to be now laying them by in order for the purpose: while I feel that, once aroused to a view of the liability, I could more innocently leave to the discretion of survivors the disposition of lands and money than that of my private utterances to my friends. In a case of differing or opposing views of duty,--if my own is clear and stringent, I cannot innocently leave the matter to the chance of other persons’ convictions. There cannot be a more strictly personal duty, and I must do it myself.

I have, therefore, done it. Having made the discovery of the preservation of my letters for purposes of publication hereafter, I have ascertained my own legal rights, and acted upon them. I have adopted legal precautions against the publication of my private letters;--I have made it a condition of my confidential correspondence that my letters shall not be preserved: and I have been indulged by my friends, generally, with an acquiescence in my request that my entire correspondence, except such as relates to business, shall be destroyed. Of course, I do as I would be done by. The privacy I claim for myself, I carefully guard for others. I keep no letters of a private and passing nature. I know that others are thinking and acting with me. We enjoy, by this provision, a freedom and fulness of epistolary correspondence which could not possibly exist if the press loomed in the distance, or executors’ eyes were known to be in wait hereafter. Our correspondence has all the flow and lightness of the most secret talk. This is a present reward, and a rich one, for the effort and labour of making our views and intentions understood. But it is not our only reward. We perceive that we have fixed attention upon what is becoming an important point of Morals: and we feel, in our inmost hearts, that we have done what we could to guard from encroachment an important right, and from destruction a precious privilege. This may appear a strange statement to persons whose privacy is safe in their obscurity. Those who know in their own experience the liabilities of fame, will understand, and deeply feel, what I have said.

I have mentioned above, that, to us in seclusion, History, Life, and Speculation, assume a continuity such as would not have been believed possible by ourselves in former days, when they appeared to constitute departments of study as separate as moral studies can be. It would be curious and interesting to an observer of the human mind, to pass from retreat to retreat, and watch the progress of this fusion of objects; to see the formerly busy member of society--“the practical man,”--growing speculative in his turn of thought; the speculative writer nourishing more and more of an antiquarian taste; and the antiquary finding seclusion serve as well as the passage of ages, and viewing the modes and instruments of the life of to-day with the eye and the gusto of the antiquary of ten centuries hence.

And not only in their studies would men of such differing tastes be found to be brought together under the influences of sequestration from the world. There are matters of moral perception and taste in which they would draw near no less remarkably. The one conspicuous, undying humanity, which is the soul of all the forms of life that they contemplate, must be, to all, the sun of their intellectual day, beneath whose penetrating light all adventitious distinctions melt into insignificance. Distinctions of rank, for instance, become attenuated to a previously inconceivable degree. To the antiquary, as well as to the most radical speculator, there would be little more in the sovereign entering the sick-room than any other stranger whom kindness might bring. It requires that we should live in the midst of the arrangements of society, that our conventional ideas should be nourished by daily associations, in order to keep up even the remembrance of differences of hereditary rank, so overpowering in our view are the great interests of life which are common to all,--Duty, Thought, Love, Joy, Sorrow, and Death.

If the sovereign were to enter our rooms, there would be strong interests and affections connected with her, but interests relating to her responsibilities and her destinies, and scarcely at all to her rank--to the singularity, and not the exaltation, of her position. It is a strong doubt to me, whether one of high degree, placed in our circumstances, could long retain aristocratic ideas and tendencies; whether to the proudest noble, shut up in his chamber for five years, the cottage child he sees from his window, the footboy who brings his fuel, must not necessarily become as imposing to his imagination and his heart as the young princes of the blood.

Something of the same process takes place, even with regard to the distinctions of intellectual nobility. As for the nothingness of literary fame, amidst the stress of personal trial (except in the collateral benefits it brings), an hour in the sick-room might convince the most superstitious worshipper of celebrity. As for the rest; in the presence of the general ignorance, on the brink of that black abyss, our best lights are really so ineffectual, that it is impossible to pride ourselves on our intellectual differences, ranging merely as from the torch to the farthing candle.

In truth, in our retreat, moral considerations are all in all. Moral distinctions are the chief; and moral interests, common to all, are supreme. They are so from their essential nature; and they are so to us especially, from the singular advantage of our position for seeing their beauty, and the abundance of it. We could make known--what is little suspected by busy stirrers in the world, and wholly disbelieved by despondent moralists who dwell amidst its apparent confusion--that there is a deep heaven lying inclosed in the very centre of society, and a genuine divinity residing in the heart of every member of it, which might, if we would but recognise it, check, our longing to leave the present scene, to search for God and Heaven elsewhere. All, that is most frivolous and insignificant is ever most noisy and obtrusive; all that is most wicked is most boastful and audacious; all that is worst in men, and society, has a tendency to come uppermost; and thus the most superficial observers of life are the most despondent. Meantime, whatever is holy, pure, and peaceable, works silently and unremittingly; and while turbulent passions are exhausting themselves before the eyes of men, a calm and perpetual renovation is spreading outwards from the central heart, of humanity. I have the image before my eyes at this moment--the awful type of the blessed reality--in the tossing sea, which the neighbours dare hardly look upon. It rages and rolls, it dashes, the drift-wood on the shore, and heavy squalls come driving over it, like messengers of dismay. At this very instant, how calm are its depths! There light dwells, as long as there is light in heaven; and there is no end to the treasures of beauty on which it shines. If it be a fable that there are happy beings dwelling there, basking and singing, unconscious of the tempests overhead, it is certainly true that it is thus in the upper world, of which the ocean is a type. It is true, as a friend said to me, that “the dark is full of beautiful things.” Without an image, speaking in the plainest and most absolute terms, the least known parts of human life are full of moral beauty. I am fully persuaded, that, if we wish to extend and confirm our ideas of Heaven, we should not wander back and afar to the old Eden, or forward and upward to some bright star of the firmament, but we should look into the retired places of our own actual world, of our own country, of our own town and village. We should look into the faces to be met in the street every day; we should look round by the light of our common sun. However, my immediate business is to say that we, who are not abroad in the streets, and cannot go in bodily presence into the by-places of life, have more of this heaven disclosed to us than others, because we appear to need it more. If any one of us could and might tell what we know of the good of human hearts, the heavenly deeds of human hands, the desponding would hang their heads no longer with fear, but with shame for their fear. If I alone might make a record of the heavenly aspects which have been presented in this one room, such a record would extinguish all revilings of man and of life. And when I think that what has appeared to me must, in natural course, have appeared to all my companions in infirmity, when I gather into one all these revelations of the real moral life of society, I perceive that, till death satisfies us in regard to a local heaven, we may well be satisfied with that which lies all round about us--not mute, while tender and pitying voices speak to us; nor wholly unseen, while tearful or kindling eyes meet our own.

Thus, in some few of its leading aspects, does Life appear to the invalid.

DEATH TO THE INVALID.

“To smell a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less
are the thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.”

FULLER.

“And yet as angels, in some brighter dreams,
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.”
HENRY VAUGHAN.

What subject is so interesting to the full of life as that of death? What taste is so universal in childhood and youth as that for learning all that can be known of the thoughts and feelings of the dying? Did we not all, in our young days, turn to the death part in all biographies; to the death articles in all cyclopædias; to the discourses on sickness and death in all sermon books; to the prayers in the prospect of death in all books of devotion? Do not the most common-place writers of fiction crowd their novels with death scenes, and indifferent tragedy writers kill off almost all their characters? Do not people crowd to executions; and do not those who stay at home learn all they can of the last words and demeanour of the sufferers? Are not the visions of heroic children, (and of many grown children), chiefly about pain and a noble departure? Is there any curiosity more lively than that which we all feel about the revelations of persons resuscitated from drowning? Is it not their nearer position to death which makes sick persons so awful to children who are not familiar with them,--so interesting a subject of speculation to all? How is it then with the invalids themselves?

Nothing need be said here of short, sharp, fatal illness. Most of us know that short, sharp illnesses, not fatal, have not enlightened us much in regard to death and its appropriate feelings. Either pain or exhaustion usually causes, in such cases, an apathy which leaves nothing to be remembered or revealed. I was once told by a child, after some hours of exhausting pain, what she had overheard below,--that if some contingency, which she specified, did not arise, I should die before night. I fully believed it; and I felt nothing, unless it were some wonder at feeling nothing. Almost every person has a similar anecdote to tell; and there remains only the short and pregnant moral, that all preparations for leaving this life, and entering on the next, should be made while the body is well and the spirit alive.

But how does death appear to those who rest half-way between it and life, or are very gradually passing over from the one to the other?

Much depends, of course, on how far the vital forces are impaired--on whether the condition be such as to obscure or to purify the spiritual vision. If we want to know the effect of nearness and realisation, and not the pathology of the case, we must suppose the vital powers to remain faithful, however they may be weakened.

In such cases, I imagine the views of death remain much what they were before, though they must necessarily become more interesting, and the conception of them more clear. I know of no case of any one who before believed, or took for granted, a future life, who began to disbelieve or doubt it through sickness. I have known cases of those who disbelieved it in health, seeing no reason to change their opinion on the approach of death,--being content to have lived--satisfied to leave life when its usefulness and pleasantness are gone--not desiring a renewal of it, but ready to awake again at the word of their Creator, if indeed a further existence be in reserve for them. Such cases I have known: but none of a material change of views in the prospect of death.

To me, the presumption of the inextinguishable vitality of the spirit afforded by the experience of material decay, is the strongest I am acquainted with. No amount of evidence of any fact before the reason, no demonstration of any truth to the understanding, affords to me such a sense of certainty as the action of the spirit yields, with regard to its own immortality, at times when there can be no deception from animal spirits, or from immediate sympathy with other minds, or from what is called the natural desire for life. It is a mistake to say, as is frequently said, that, with regard to a future life, “the wish is father to the thought,” always or generally. Long-suffering invalids can tell that there are seasons, neither few nor short, when the wishes are all the other way,--when life is so oppressive to the frame that the happiest news would be that we should soon be non-existent,--when, thankful as we are that our beloved friends, the departed and the remaining, are to live for evermore with God, and enjoy his universe and its intercourses, we should be glad to, decline it for ourselves, and to lie down in an eternal, unbroken rest. At these seasons, when, though we _know_ all that can be said of renewed powers and relish, and a more elevated and privileged life beyond the grave, we cannot _feel_ it; and, while admitting all such consolations as truth, we cannot enjoy them, but, as a mere matter of inclination, had rather resign our privileges;--in these seasons, when the wish would be father to an opposite thought, the belief in our immortality is at the strongest; the truth of our inability to die becomes overwhelming, and the sleep of the grave appears too light to satisfy our need of rest. I believe it to be owing to this natural and unconquerable belief in our immortality, that suicide is not more common than it is among sufferers. I am persuaded that the almost intolerable weariness of long sicknesses, unrelieved by occasional fits of severe pain, would impel many to put out a hand to the laudanum-bottle, in hours when religious considerations and emotions cannot operate through the indisposition of the frame, if it were not for the intense conviction that life would not thus be extinguished, nor even suspended. I do not believe much in the “natural love of life,” which is usually said to be the preventive in such cases. I do believe in the vast operation of religious affections in withholding from the act: but I also believe in frequent instances of abstinence from death, from a mere despair of getting rid of life--a sense of necessary immortality.

I have spoken of the relief afforded by visitations of severe pain. These rally the vital forces, and dismiss the temptation, by substituting torture for weariness--at times a welcome change. The healthy are astonished at the good spirits of sufferers under tormenting complaints; and the most strait-laced preachers of fortitude and patience admit an occasional wonder that there is no suicide among that class of sufferers. The truth is, however, that the influence of acute pain, when only occasional, and not extremely protracted, is vivifying and cheering on the whole. The immediate anguish causes a temporary despair: but the reaction, when the pain departs, causes a relish of life such as the healthy and the gay hardly enjoy. Though a slow death by a torturing disease is a lot unspeakably awful to meet, and even to contemplate, there can be no question to the experienced, that illness in which severe pain sometimes occurs is less trying than some in which a different kind of suffering is not relieved by such a stimulus and its consequent sensations.

Thus much it is useful to know,--useful to the student of human nature, to the nurse, and to a sufferer under sentence of lasting disease. But instances have been known, perplexing to those inexperienced in pain, of devout thankfulness for the suffering itself, under its immediate and agonising pressure; and this in men far superior to the superstition of believing present pain the purchase-money of future ease,--the fine paid down here for admission to heavenly benefits hereafter.

Strange as this rejoicing in misery may appear, it is to some minds as natural and authorised by the laws of our being, as the joy which attends the acquisition of a great idea, or the verification of a potent truth. It is as verification that such pain is welcome. To men of the most spiritual tone of mind, every attestation of the reality of unseen objects is a boon of the highest order; and no such attestation can surpass in clearness that which is afforded by the sensible progress of decay in the material part of the sufferer’s frame. All attempt at description is here vain. Nothing but experience can convey a conception of the intense reality in which God appears supreme, Christ and his gospel divine, and holiness the one worthy aim and chief good, when our frame is refusing its offices, and we can lay hold on no immediate outward support and solace. It is conceivable to the healthy and happy, that, if waked up from sleep by a tremendous earthquake, the first recoil of terror might be followed by an intense perception of the fixity and tranquillity of the spiritual world, in immediate contact with the turbulence of the outward and lower scene. It is conceivable to us all that the drowning man may, as is recorded, see his whole life, in all its minute details, presented to him, as in clear vision, in one instant of time, as he lapses into death. Well,--something like both these experiences is that of extreme and dissolving pain, to a certain order of minds. The vision and the attestation are present, without the horrors caused, amidst an earthquake, by the misery of a perishing multitude, though at the cost of more bodily anguish than in the case of the drowning man. Though there may be keen doubts in a modest sufferer how long such anguish can be decently endured,--whether the filial submission will hold out against torment,--there is through, above and beyond such doubts, so overpowering an impression of the vitality of the conscious part of us, and of the reality of the highest objects for which it was created and has lived,--so inexpressible a sense of the value of what we have prayed for, and of the evanescence of what we are losing,--that it is no wonder if the dying have been known to call for aid in their thanksgivings, and to struggle for sympathy even in their incommunicable convictions. If the shadows of the dark valley part, and disclose to such an one the regions that lie in the light of God’s countenance, it is no wonder that he calls on those near him to look and see, though he is making the transit alone.

Those who speculate outside on the experience of the sick-room, are eager to know whether this solitary transit is often gone over in imagination, and whether with more or less relish and success than by those at ease and in full vigour. In my childhood, I attended, as an observer, one fine morning, at the funeral of a person with whom I was well acquainted, without feeling any strong affection. I was somewhat moved by the solemnity, and by the tears of the family; but the most powerful feeling of the day was excited when the evening closed in, gusty and rainy, and I thought of the form I knew so well, left alone in the cold and the darkness, while everybody else was warm and sheltered. I felt that, if I had been one of the family, I could not have neglectfully and selfishly gone to bed that night, but must have passed the hours till daylight by the grave. Every child has felt this: and every child longs to know whether a sick friend contemplates that first night in the cold grave, and whether the prospect excites any emotions.

Surely;--we do contemplate it--frequently--eagerly. In the dark night, we picture the whole scene, under every condition the imagination can originate. By day, we hold up before our eyes that most wondrous piece of our worldly wealth--our own right-hand; examine its curious texture and mechanism, and call up the image of its sure deadness and decay, And with what emotions? Each must answer for himself. As for me, it is with mere curiosity, and without any concern, about the lonely, cold grave. I doubt whether any one’s imagination rests there,--whether there is ever any panic about the darkness and the worm of the narrow house.

As for our real future home,--the scene where our living selves are to be,--how is it possible that we should not be often resorting thither in imagination, when it is to be our next excursion from our little abode of sickness and helplessness,--when it is so certain that we cannot be disappointed of it, however wearily long it may be before we go,--when all that has been best in our lives, our sabbaths, all sunset evenings and starry nights, all our reverence and love that are sanctified by death,--when all these things have always pointed to our future life and been associated with it, how is it possible that we should not be ever looking forward to it, now when our days are low and weary, and our pleasures few? The liability is to too great familiarity with the subject. When our words make children look abashed, and call a constraint over the manners of those we are conversing with, and cause even the most familiar eyes to be averted, we find ourselves reminded that the subject of a person’s death is one usually thought not easy to discuss with him. In our retirement, we are apt to forget, till expressly reminded, the importance of distinctions of rank and property in society, so nearly as they vanish in our survey of life, in comparison with moral differences; and, in like manner, we have to recal an almost lost idea, that death is an awkward topic, except in the abstract, when our casual mention of a will, or of some transaction to follow our death, introduces an awe and constraint into conversation.

Such familiarity may be, and often is, condemned as presumptuous. There may be cases in which it is so; but I think it would be hard to make the censure general. The confident reckoning on the joys of heaven for one’s self, on any grounds, while others are supposed to be condemned to a contrary lot, is a superstition more offensive to my feelings than that which renders a trembling soul, clinging to life, aghast at the idea of meeting its Maker and Father. But a soul without any self-complacency, or ignorant confidence, may yet be easy and eager in the prospect of entering upon that awful new scene. Setting aside all the inducements from the hope of relief and rest, the humblest spirit may be conceived of as tranquil and aspiring in full view of the transition; and this under a full sense of its sins and failures, and without reliance on any imaginary security,--without need of other reliance than its Father in Heaven. There may be--there is--in some, so continual a regard to God in life, that there cannot seem anything very new and strange in going anywhere where He is. There maybe--and there is--in some, so earnest a desire to be purified from sin, that they would undergo anything on earth to be freed from it, and therefore fear nothing, but rather welcome any discipline which may be reserved beyond. Knowing that the revelation of the evil of their sin must be most painful, but also most necessary to their progress, they are ready, even eager for it, pressing forward to the suffering through which they hope to be made perfect. If with such dispositions is joined that ardent, reverential filial love which generates perfect trust, and rejects any interposition between itself and the benign countenance in whose light it lives, there may be nothing blameable or dangerous in the readiness for death, or in the happy familiarity with which the event may be spoken of. It is a case in which every man should be slow to judge his neighbour, while the natural verdict of thoughtful observers would seem to be that a sufferer under irremediable illness, who preserves a general patience, cares for others’ happiness more than for his own, and has always lived in view of an eternal life, can hardly be wrong in anticipating that life with ease and cheerfulness, whatever analysis or judgment dogmatists may make of his state of mind.

Whether our imaginings of Death are more or less a true anticipation of it, can be proved only by experience. It may be found that they are no more just than my idea of the matter when I was a child, when my brother and I dug a grave, and then lay down in it, by turns, and shut our eyes, to try what dying was like. Practically, such failures of conception cannot matter much. A person who is setting out on foreign travel for the first time, takes no harm by expecting the voyage and the landing among foreigners to be something very unlike what they prove. His preconceptions answered their purpose, by rendering him ready and willing to go, and preventing his being taken by surprise by the summons. Still, those of us have greatly the advantage whose minds are enlarged by knowledge, and their imaginations animated and strengthened by exercise. Some of the most innocent and kind-hearted people I have known have been the most afraid of death,--not from consciousness of sin, but from dread of overpowering novelty--from a horror of feeling lost among scenes where there is nothing familiar; while, in opposite cases, a philosophic interest and wonder have been known to go far in reconciling a highly intellectual man to leaving the companions he loved best in life.

There can be no question as to the difference in the ease of departure (moral conditions being supposed the same) of the housewife, whose days and faculties have been occupied with the market, the shop, and the home where her whole life has been passed, and the philosopher, whose nerves thrill with delight, unmixed with terror, at the very first view of the new wonders revealed by Lord Rosse’s speculum. It is striking, that a man about to be thrust forth from life for a plot of murder on an enormous scale, should, while waiting for death the next moment, whisper to a fellow-sufferer, “Now we shall soon know the great secret;” while a pure and beneficent being, beloved by God and his neighbour, should pray to be loaded with any weight of years and sufferings rather than go from the familiar scene on which he has opened his eyes every day for sixty years. “Grand secrets” have no charms for him, but only horrors; and as for new scenes, even within our own corner of the earth, mountains and waterfalls overpower him, and he shuffles back to shops and streets.

Let persons so constitutionally different be shut into a sick-room, knowing that they will issue from it only by death, and what will they do? By the habit of looking forward to this exit for relief, the timid may come to speak and think of it as tranquilly as the speculative; but then, when the sensation overtakes him, the difference is again apparent. It does seem as if there were in the seizure of death a sensation wholly peculiar, and which cannot be mistaken. Cases of unconsciousness are no evidence to the contrary; and there are so many instances of decisive declaration by the dying, as to make the fact pretty certain. Then finally appears (supposing both conscious) the distinction in the act of dying, between the enlarged and speculative mind and the contracted one which clings to details. Then the harassed sufferer, who has a hundred times exclaimed, in the struggles of disease, “O! this is dying many times over!” shudders out at last, in quite another tone, “O God! this is death!” Then the exhausted debauchee, after every hollow show of preparation by decorous prayer, mutters, in the terror of the reality, “O God! this is death!” At such a time, the philosophic physician, seizing his sole opportunity of experience of the phenomena of death, keeps his finger on his pulse as his heart is coming to a stop, and notifies its last beat as a fact in useful science. At such a time, the diligent Christian--a judge, a rich man, without a crook in his lot--suddenly sentenced, struggles to breathe into his wife’s bending ear his last words: “This is death! Our children ... tell them--I have had everything man could enjoy ... and all is nothing in comparison with holiness. Pure and holy--make them. Care for nothing else! O! all is well!” When he could no longer speak or move, his countenance was full of soul; not a trace of fear upon it, but a whole heaven of joyful expectation. Here are differences!