Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?
Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin
came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief,
and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in
their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency.
But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling
daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family,
and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous
rot of life should make him easier to harvest.
Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day
grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter
than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes,
glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children;
the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house
was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass;
her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless,
familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every
woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this;
but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried;
it is but the first salutation to the possibilities
of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored;
therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still
have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide,
does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread
forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful,
new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics,
the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither, broken-hearted;
here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death;
here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.
Pages:
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787