Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush Page 16
Canadians flock in crowds to visit the dying, and to gaze upon the dead. A doctor told me that being called into the country to visit a very sick man, he was surprised on finding the wife of his patient sitting alone before the fire in the lower room, smoking a pipe. He naturally inquired if her husband was better?
“Oh, no, sir, far from that; he is dying!”
“Dying! and you here?”
“I can’t help that, sir. The room is so crowded with the neighbours, that I can’t get in to wait upon him.”
“Follow me,” said the doctor. “I’ll soon make a clearance for you.”
On ascending the stairs that led to the apartment of the sick man, he found them crowded with people struggling to get in, to take a peep at the poor man. It was only by telling them that he was the doctor, that he forced his way to the bedside. He found his patient in a high fever, greatly augmented by the bustle, confusion, and heat, occasioned by so many people round him. With great difficulty he cleared the room of these intruders, and told the brother of his patient to keep everyone but the sick man’s wife out of the house. The brother followed the doctor’s advice, and the man cheated the curiosity of the death-seekers, and recovered.
The Canadians spend a great deal of money upon their dead. An old lady told me that her nephew, a very large farmer, who had the misfortune to lose his wife in childbed, had laid out a great deal of money – a little fortune she termed it – on her grave-clothes. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “it is a thousand pities that you did not go and see her before she was buried. She was dressed so expensively, and she made such a beautiful corpse! Her cap was of real thread lace, trimmed with white French ribbons, and her linen the finest that could be bought in the country.”
The more ostentatious the display of grief for the dead, the less I have always found of the reality. I heard two young ladies, who had recently lost a mother, not more than sixteen years older than the eldest of the twain, lamenting most pathetically that they could not go to a public ball, because they were in mourning for ma’! Oh, what a pitiful farce is this, of wearing mourning for the dead! But as I have a good deal to say to sensible people on that subject, I will defer my long lecture until the next chapter.
RANDOM THOUGHTS.
“When is Youth’s gay heart the lightest? –
When the torch of health burns brightest,
And the soul’s rich banquet lies
In air and ocean, earth and skies;
Till the honied cup of pleasure
Overflows with mental treasure.
“When is Love’s sweet dream the sweetest? –
When a kindred heart thou meetest,
Unpolluted with the strife,
The selfish aims that tarnish life;
Ere the scowl of care has faded
The shining chaplet Fancy braided,
And emotions pure and high
Swell the heart and fill the eye;
Rich revealings of a mind
Within a loving breast enshrined,
To thine own fond bosom plighted,
In affection’s bonds united:
The sober joys of after years
Are nothing to those smiles and fears.
“When is Sorrow’s sting the strongest? –
When friends grow cold we’ve loved the longest,
And the bankrupt heart would borrow
Treacherous hopes to cheat the morrow;
Dreams of bliss by reason banish’d,
Early joys that quickly vanish’d,
And the treasured past appears
Only to augment our tears;
When, within itself retreating,
The spirit owns life’s joys are fleeting,
Yet, racked with anxious doubts and fears,
Trusts, blindly trusts to future years.
“Oh, this is grief, the preacher saith, –
The world’s dark woe that worketh death!
Yet, oft beneath its influence bowed,
A beam of hope will burst the cloud,
And heaven’s celestial shore appears
Slow rising o’er the tide of years,
Guiding the spirit’s darkling way
Through thorny paths to endless day.
Then the toils of life are done,
Youth and age are both as one;
Sorrow never more can sting,
Neglect or pain the bosom wring;
And the joys bless’d spirits prove,
Far exceeds all earthly love!”
WEARING MOURNING FOR THE DEAD
“What is death? – my sister, say.”
“Ask not, brother, breathing clay.
Ask the earth on which we tread,
That silent empire of the dead.
Ask the sea – its myriad waves,
Living, leap o’er countless graves!”
“Earth and ocean answer not,
Life is in their depths forgot.”
Ask yon pale extended form,
Unconscious of the coming storm,
That breathed and spake an hour ago,
Of heavenly bliss and penal woe; –
Within yon shrouded figure lies
“The mystery of mysteries!”
S.M.
Among the many absurd customs that the sanction of time and the arbitrary laws of society have rendered indispensable, there is not one that is so much abused, and to which mankind so fondly clings, as that of wearing mourning for the dead! – from the ostentatious public mourning appointed by governments for the loss of their rulers, down to the plain black badge, worn by the humblest peasant for the death of parent or child.
To attempt to raise one feeble voice against a practice sanctioned by all nations, and hallowed by the most solemn religious rites, appears almost sacrilegious. There is something so beautiful, so poetical, so sacred, in this outward sign of a deep and heartfelt sorrow, that to deprive death of his sable habiliments – the melancholy hearse, funeral plumes, sombre pall, and a long array of drooping night-clad mourners, together with the awful clangour of the doleful bell – would rob the stern necessity of our nature of half its terrors, and tend greatly to destroy that religious dread which is so imposing, and which affords such a solemn lesson to the living.
Alas! Where is the need of all this black parade? Is it not a reproach to Him, who, in his wisdom, appointed death to pass upon all men? Were the sentence confined to the human species, we might have more reason for these extravagant demonstrations of grief: but in every object around us we see inscribed the mysterious law of change. The very mountains crumble and decay with years; the great sea shrinks and grows again; the lofty forest tree, that has drank the dews of heaven, laughed in the sunlight, and shook its branches at a thousand storms, yields to the same inscrutable destiny, and bows its tall forehead to the dust.
Life lives upon death, and death reproduces life, through endless circles of being, from the proud tyrant man down to the blind worm his iron heel tramples in the earth. Then wherefore should we hang out this black banner for those who are beyond the laws of change and chance?
“Yea, they have finish’d:
For them there is no longer any future.
No evil hour knocks at their door
With tidings of mishap – far off are they,
Beyond desire or fear.”
It is the dismal adjuncts of death which have invested it with those superstitious terrors that we would fain see removed. The gloom arising from these melancholy pageants forms a black cloud, whose dense shadow obscures the light of life to the living. And why, we ask, should death be invested with such horror? Death in itself is not dreadful; it is but the change of one mode of being for another – the breaking forth of the winged soul from its earthly chrysalis; or, as an old Latin poet has so happily described it –
“Thus life for ever runs its endless race,
Death as a line which but divides the space –
A stop which can but for a moment last,
Nature presents in all her laws such a beautiful and wonderful harmony, that it is as impossible for death to produce discord among them, as for night to destroy, by the intervention of its shadow, the splendour of the coming day. Were men taught from infancy to regard death as a natural consequence, a fixed law of their being, instead as an awful punishment for sin – as the friend and benefactor of mankind, not the remorseless tyrant and persecutor – to die would no longer be considered an evil. Let this hideous skeleton be banished into darkness, and replaced by a benignant angel, wiping away all tears, healing all pain, burying in oblivion all sorrow and care, calming every turbulent passion, and restoring man, reconciled to his Maker, to a state of purity and peace; young and old would then go forth to meet him with lighted torches, and hail his approach with songs of thanksgiving and welcome.
And this is really the case with all but the desperately wicked, who show that they despise the magnificent boon of life by the bad use they make of it, by their blasphemous defiance of God and good, and their unwillingness to be renewed in his image.
The death angel is generally met with more calmness by the dying than by surviving friends. By the former, the dreaded enemy is hailed as a messenger of peace, and they sink tranquilly into his arms, with a smile upon their lips.
The death of the Christian is a beautiful triumph over the fears of life. In Him who conquered death, and led captivity captive, he finds the fruition of his being, the eternal blessedness promised to him in the Gospel, which places him beyond the wants and woes of time. The death of such a man should be celebrated as a sacred festival, not lamented as a dreary execution, – as the era of a new birth, not the extinction of being.
It is true that death is a profound sleep, from which no one can awaken to tell his dreams. But why on that account should we doubt that it is less blessed than its twin brother, whose resemblance it bears, and whose presence we all sedulously court? Invest sleep, however, with the same dismal garb; let your bed be a coffin, your canopy a pall, your nightdress a shroud; let the sobs of mourners, and the tolling of bells lull you to repose, – and few persons would willingly, or tranquilly, close their eyes to sleep.
And then, this absurd fashion of wearing black for months and years for the dead; let us calmly consider the philosophy of the thing, its use and abuse. Does it confer any benefit on the dead? Does it afford any consolation to the living? Morally or physically, does it produce the least good? Does it soften one regretful pang, or dry one bitter tear, or make the wearers wiser or better? If it does not produce any ultimate benefit, it should be at once discarded as a superstitious relic of more barbarous times, when men could not gaze on the simple, unveiled face of truth, but obscured the clear daylight of her glance under a thousand fantastic masks.
The ancients were more consistent in their mourning than the civilized people of the present day. They sat upon the ground and fasted, with rent garments, and ashes strewn upon their heads. This mortification of the flesh was a sort of penance inflicted by the self-tortured mourner for his own sins, and those of the dead. If this grief were not of a deep or lasting nature, the mourner found relief for his mental agonies in humiliation and personal suffering. He did not array himself in silk, and wool, and fine linen, and garments cut in the most approved fashion of the day, like our modern beaux and belles, when they testify to the public their grief for the loss of relation or friend, in the most expensive and becoming manner.
Verily, if we must wear our sorrow upon our sleeve, why not return to the sackcloth and ashes, as the most consistent demonstration of that grief which, hidden in the heart, surpasseth show.
But, then, sackcloth is a most unmanageable material. A handsome figure would be lost, buried, annihilated, in a sackcloth gown; it would be so horribly rough; it would wound the delicate skin of a fine lady; it could not be confined in graceful folds by clasps of jet, and pearl, and ornaments in black and gold. “Sackcloth? Faugh! – away with it. It smells of the knotted scourge and the charnelhouse.” We, too, say, “Away with it!” True grief has no need of such miserable provocatives to woe.
The barbarians who cut and disfigured their faces for the dead, showed a noble contempt of the world, by destroying those personal attractions which the loss of the beloved had taught them to despise. But who now would have the fortitude and self-denial to imitate such an example? The mourners in crape, and silk, and French merino, would rather die themselves than sacrifice their beauty at the shrine of such a monstrous sorrow.
How often have I heard a knot of gossips exclaim, as some widow of a gentleman in fallen circumstances glided by in her rusty weeds, “What shabby black that woman wears for her husband! I should be ashamed to appear in public in such faded mourning.”
And yet, the purchase of that shabby black may have cost the desolate mourner and her orphan children the price of many a necessary meal. Ah, this putting of a poor family into black, and all the funeral trappings for pallbearers and mourners, what a terrible affair it is! what anxious thoughts! what bitter heartaches it costs!
But the usages of society demand the sacrifice, and it must be made. The head of the family has suddenly been removed from his earthly toils, at a most complicated crisis of his affairs, which are so involved that scarcely enough can be collected to pay the expenses of the funeral, and put his family into decent mourning, but every exertion must be made to do this. The money that might, after the funeral was over, have paid the rent of a small house, and secured the widow and her young family from actual want, until she could look around and obtain some situation in which she could earn a living for herself and them, must all be sunk in conforming to a useless custom, upheld by pride and vanity in the name of grief.
“How will the funeral expenses ever be paid?” exclaims the anxious, weeping mother. “When it is all over, and the mourning bought, there will not remain a single copper to find us in bread.” The sorrow of obtaining this useless outward show of grief engrosses all the available means of the family, and that is expended upon the dead which might, with careful management, have kept the living from starving. Oh, vanity of vanities! there is no folly on earth that exceeds the vanity of this!
There are many persons who put off their grief when they put on their mourning, and it is a miserable satire on mankind to see these somber-clad beings in festal halls mingling with the gay and happy, their melancholy garments affording a painful contrast to light laughter, and eyes sparkling with pleasure.
Their levity, however, must not be mistaken for hypocrisy. The world is in fault, not they. Their grief is already over, – gone like a cloud from before the sun; but they are forced to wear black for a given time. They are true to their nature, which teaches them that “no grief with man is permanent,” that the storms of to-day will not darken the heavens tomorrow. It is complying with a lying custom makes them hypocrites; and, as the world always judges by appearances, it so happens that by adhering to one of its conventional rules, appearances in this instance are against them.
Nay, the very persons who, in the first genuine outburst of natural grief besought them to moderate their sorrow, to dry their tears, and be comforted for the loss they had sustained, are among the first to censure them for following advice so common and useless. Tears are as necessary to the afflicted as showers are to the parched earth, and are the best and sweetest remedy for excessive grief.
To the mourner we would say – Weep on; nature requires your tears. They are sent in mercy by Him who wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus. The man of sorrows himself taught us to weep.
We once heard a very beautiful volatile young lady exclaim, with something very like glee in her look and tone, after reading a letter she had received by the post, with its ominous black bordering and seal –“Grandmamma is dead! We shall have to go into deep mourning. I am so glad, for black is so becoming to me!”
An old aunt, who was present, expressed her surprise at this
indecorous avowal; when the young lady replied, with great naivete –“I never saw grandmamma in my life. I cannot be expected to feel any grief for her death.”
“Perhaps not,” said the aunt. “But why, then, make a show of that which you do not feel? ”
“Oh, it’s the custom of the world. You know we must. It would be considered shocking not to go into very deep mourning for such a near relation.”
The young lady inherited a very nice legacy, too, from her grandmamma; and, had she spoken the truth, she would have said, “I cannot weep for joy.”
Her mourning, in consequence, was of the deepest and most expensive kind; and she really did look charming in her “love of a black crape bonnet!” as she skipped before the glass, admiring herself and it, when it came home fresh from the milliner’s.
In contrast to the pretty young heiress, we knew a sweet orphan girl whose grief for the death of her mother, to whom she was devotedly attached, lay deeper than this hollow tinsel show; and yet the painful thought that she was too poor to pay this mark of respect to the memory of her beloved parent, in a manner suited to her birth and station, added greatly to the poignancy of her sorrow.
A family who had long been burthened with a cross old aunt, who was a martyr to rheumatic gout, and whose violent temper kept the whole house in awe, and whom they dared not offend for fear of her leaving her wealth to strangers, were in the habit of devoutly wishing the old lady a happy release from her sufferings. When this long anticipated event at length took place, the very servants were put into the deepest mourning. What a solemn farce – we should say, lie – was this!
The daughters of a wealthy farmer had prepared everything to attend the great agricultural provincial show. Unfortunately, a grandfather to whom they all seemed greatly attached, died most inconveniently the day before, and as they seldom keep a body in Canada over the second day, he was buried early in the morning of the one appointed for their journey. They attended the remains to the grave, but after the funeral was over they put off their black garments and started for the show, and did not resume them again until after their return. People may think this very shocking, but it was not the laying aside the black that was so, but the fact of their being able to go from a grave to a scene of confusion and gaiety. The black clothes had nothing to do with this want of feeling, which would have remained the same under a black or a scarlet vestment.