A TALE OF TWELVE. 43 in advance of the unbelief of childhood. More in keeping with the spirit of We are Seven is that passage in one of the Twice-told Tales of Dr. Holmes's gifted friend and compatriot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, where we see a comely woman, with a pretty rosebud of a daughter, come to select a gravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before the mother calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of her loss; "but the daughter evidently had no real knowledge of what death's doings were. . . Her feelings were almost the same as if she still stood side by side, and arm in arm, with the departed, looking at the slabs of marble. . . . Perchance her dead sister was a closer companion than in life." A twinsister might thus be warranted in saying, in death as in life, "We are one." "Couldst thou believe me dead? Thy living sense Mistook itself. Howe'er the spirit deems, Death cannot lie in life's experience." William Etty, the painter, describes in his diary a visit to the home of four little motherless children, one of whom wrung his heart by her eager inquiries why mamma did not come back. Told that she was gone to heaven, "Why does she not write, then ?" asked the wistful little girl. Etty was as willing and cordial a consoler as one in Wordsworth, who Said the old man, 'is of an age to weep At any grave or solemn spectacle, Inly distressed or overpowered with awe, He knows not wherefore; but the boy to-day So with Duncan's orphans in The Lady of the Lake : "His stripling son stands mournful by, His youngest weeps, but knows not why." The first in Mrs. Browning's fourfold aspect of life is of an age when the worst recorded change was of apple dropped from bough; and of the shadow of death there was as yet not the shadow of a shade : "Then the loving took you up Soft, upon their elder knees,- Underneath the churchyard trees, Oh, ye lifted up your head, and it seemed as if they said With a swan-wing for a sail !— Oh, ye kissed their loving lips For the merry, merry tale!— So carelessly ye thought upon the Dead," And so inconceivable at that epoch of existence was the bare imagination of Death. J A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. GENESIS xliv. 30. UDAH'S eloquence in pleading with his unknown brother Joseph, not to detain from their fond father the lad Benjamin, who was the darling of his old age, urged the too certain event of the patriarch's death of a broken heart, if Benjamin returned not safely to his roof. Those grey hairs would, all too surely, be brought down in sorrow to the grave, if the lad were kept from him,-" seeing that his life is bound up in the lad's life." Take the one, and you take the other too. Even deprive Jacob of the daily sight and sense of Benjamin's life, and you take his own. The two are bound up together. Already had the brethren assured Egypt's viceroy that the lad could not leave his father; for if he should leave his father, his father would die. He had left him, at their A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. 45 instance; but they felt that their father's very life was now in their hands, and that upon the viceroy's decision hung the final issue to Jacob of life or of death. For here was where he had 66 -garnered up his heart; Where either he must live, or bear no life; The fountain from the which his current ran, Apply Corneille's lines, "Que vivre sans vous voir est un sort rigoureux ! c'est ou ne vivre point, ou vivre malheureux; c'est une longue mort." As with Gyges in ancient story, so devoted to, so wrapped up in, so absorbed by, the presence of his wife, "That he no longer lived, save in the life " which her full-flowing existence poured on his. Or, as with the subject-object of Shakspeare's sonnets,—“ You are my all-theworld," "None else to me, nor I to none alive," "You are so strongly in my purpose bred, That all the world besides methinks are dead. “But do thy worst to steal thyself away, Imlac admonishes the pining and repining princess, in Rasselas, against increasing the burthen of life by a voluntary accumulation of misery; the weariness of life will continue or increase when her loss of Pekuah shall be forgotten: that she has been deprived of one pleasure is, he suggests, no very good reason for rejection of the rest. "Since Pekuah was taken from me," she replies, "I have no pleasure to reject or retain." To have no one to love or trust, is to have little to hope; it is to want the radical principle of happiness. Dr. Thomas Brown, in his analysis of the "Immediate Emotions," lays stress on the relation of the object lost to all the plans which have engaged us, and all the hopes which we have been forming, as a very abundant source of the misery which is felt in a recent affliction. These plans and hopes seem now all frustrated, and our whole life, as it were, in those feelings which alone constituted life to us, suddenly rent or broken. To be bereaved of his children was, to Jacob, to be bereaved indeed. Joseph he mourned as dead, though the death was not a positively ascertained fact. Benjamin, if detained in Egypt, he would mourn as absent; and it seems that to Jacob, in his old age, absence and death differed not with the difference a modern poet assigns to them. Wordsworth's Solitary, in his description of his own and his wife's feelings upon the decease of their children, exclaims— "Absence and death, how differ they!" Absence and death-to apply another exclamation in Wordsworth-like, but oh, how different!' Yet so like, in the estimate of some, that the distinction is practically without a difference. One of the biographers of Olympia Morata, expatiating on the pangs of that parting scene with her mother, whom she was never to see again, quotes a fragment from a letter of her old friend's, Curio Curone, written to the elder lady several years afterwards, in which he recurs to the sorrows of that time: "The pangs of that departure must have been even as the pangs of death, when you felt that probably in this life you would never see her again. And truly," he adds, "you might well feel that the separation of death was not very different from that caused by so great a distance." Painful partings of this sort are justly said to be always most painful to those who are left behind-the necessity of action, and the excitement of going forth to meet new scenes and new fortunes, bracing the nerves and giving diversion to the grief of those who are gone. A meditative poet has put this reflection into verse : "Oh, you Are happier than I, for you have change A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. "Into this dead-house, for I call it dead Now you are gone, you did put life and light, 47 "death Mrs. Jameson professes to have had no friend worthy of the name whose absence was not pain and dread to her; itself is terrible only as it is absence." The presence of those whom we love, she hails as a double life; while absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death. In one of Southey's letters to his deaf friend, Grosvenor Bedford, the recent decease of an old fellow-collegian and endeared associate is thus referred to: "You will miss him in your thoughts, for deafness must make you live much with the absent, as I do because of my retirement. Probably you would be less in my mind were I to see you daily than you are now, when something or other continually leads me to recollections of which you form a part. Indeed, I have now attained an age, and, what is better, a state of mind, which makes me think of the absent and the dead with the same sort of feeling, the same complacency, the same affection; only with more tenderness of the dead." A couplet of Pope's will nearly express this state of feeling :— "Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear; A sigh the absent claims, the dead a tear.” Since thus divided-equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth or sea.” Chateaubriand declares that the death of friends is to be reckoned, not from the moment when they die, but from that of our ceasing to enjoy their society. And Campbell exclaims— "Absence! is not the soul torn by it From more than light, or life, or breath? |