The Crown of Thorns [48]
in the full flush of life and health,--that soft and consecrating spell which falls upon us, drawing in all our thoughts from the present, arresting, as it were, the current of our being, and turning it back and holding it still as the flood of actual life rushes by us,--while in that trance of soul the beings of the past are shadowed--old friends, old days, old scenes recur, familiar looks beam close upon us, familiar words reecho in our ears, and we are closed up and absorbed with the by-gone, until tears dissolve the film from our eyes, and some shock of the actual wakes us from our reverie;--all these, I say make the dead to commune with us as really as though in bodily form they should come out from the chambers of their mysterious silence, and speak to us. And if life consists in experiences, and not mere physical relations,--and if love and communion belong to that experience, though they take place in meditation, or in dreams, or by actual contact,--then, in that hour of remembrance, have we really lived with the departed, and the departed have come back and lived with us. Though dead, they have spoken to us. And though memory sometimes induces the spirit of heaviness,--though it is often the agent of conscience, and wakens u to chastise,--yet, it is wonderful how, from events that were deeply mingled with pain, it will extract an element of sweetness. a writer, in relating one of the experiences of her sick-room, has illustrated this. In an hour of suffering, when no one was near here, she went out from her bed and her room to another apartment, and looked out upon a glorious landscape of sunrise and spring-time. "I was suffering too much to enjoy this picture at the moment," she says, "but how was it at the end of the year? The pains of all those hours were annihilated,--as completely vanished as if they had never been; while the momentary peep behind the window-curtain made me possessor of this radiant picture for evermore." "Whence came this wide difference," she asks, "between the good and the evil? Because good is indissolubly connected with ideas,--with the unseen realities which are indestructible." And though the illustration which she thus gives may bear the impression of an individual personality, instead of a universal truth, still, in the instance to which I apply it, I believe it will very generally hold true, that memory leaves a pleasant rather than a painful impression. At least, there is so much that is pleasant mingled with it that we would not willingly lose the faculty of memory,--the consciousness that we can thus call back the dead, and hear their voices,--that we have the power of softening the rugged realities which only suggest our loss and disappointment, by transferring the scene and the hour to the past and the departed. And, as our conceptions become more and more spiritual, we shall find the real to be less dependent upon the outward and the visible,--we shall learn how much life there is in a thought,--how veritable are the communions of spirit; and the hour in which memory gives us the vision of the dead will be prized by us as an hour of actual experience and such opportunities will grow more precious to us. No, we would not willingly lose this power of memory. One would not say, "Let the dead never come back to me in a thought, or a dream; let them never glide before me in the still watch of meditation; let me see, let me hear them no more, even in fancy;"--not one of us would say this; and, therefore, it is evident, that whatever painful circumstance memory or association may recall,--even though it cause us to go out and weep bitterly,--there is a sacred pleasure, a tender melancholy, that speaks to us in these voices of the dead, which we are willing to cherish and repeat. It makes our tears soft and sanctifying as they fall; it makes our hearts purer and better,--makes them stronger for the conflict of life.
I remark, finally, that the dead speak to us in those religious suggestions--those consolations, invitations, and hopes--which the bereaved spirit indulges.
I remark, finally, that the dead speak to us in those religious suggestions--those consolations, invitations, and hopes--which the bereaved spirit indulges.