Angel of Death

“ Calm 'neath the angel of death's bright wings;
"There's light," he said, "will the sun soon rise?
Maybe I'd sleep when the Angelus rings."
When the bells rang in the bright'ning day,
The soul of the old man passed away. ”

“ Quoth the other, ‘I am the Angel of Death.’ ‘Welcome to thee!’ replied the man. ‘Praised be God for thy coming! I am weary of awaiting thee; for indeed long hath been thine absence from him who longeth for thee.’ Quoth the angel, ‘If thou have any business, make an end of it.’ But the other answered, saying, ‘There is nothing urgent to me as the meeting with my Lord, to whom belong might and majesty!’ And the angel said, ‘How wouldst thou liefer have me take thy soul? ”

“ Life and Death.
On a bed of pain the sick girl lay
With closed, white-lidded eyes,
As the sunset gilded the azure bay
And crimsoned the western skies,
Whilst over her head in bitter strife
Strove the Angel of Death and the Angel of Life. ”

“ Oh, we need that angel of death to come in, and now and then stir the pool of our family life, that there may be healing in it, that there may be blessing in it! Death, holding the hand of God through it, to those that stand by and see the sweetness of human love, the triumph of faith celestial, has a grandeur in it, like Christ's death on the cross; it hides out of sight of the people the ghastly, the doubt-creating features and elements of its external impediment—death becomes God's minister. ”

“ Of life and death I boldly leap,
Nor fear the fateful current's sweep,
Nor what in ambush lurks below!
For death is better than disease!
(An ANGEL with an aeolian harp hovers in the air.)
Angel. Woe! woe! eternal woe! ”

“ Yet call back thy words of doom—
They are too gay and too fair for the tomb.
Angel of Death. Thou hast seen on earth, as a passer by,
But the outward show of mortality:
Go, let the veil from thine eyes depart;
Search the secrets of every heart;
Look beyond what they seem to be;
Then come and say, are they not ripe for me.
Spirit. I have been over the green earth again;
I have heard the voice of sorrow and pain;
I saw a shining almond-tree fling
Its silver wreath, like a gift, to Spring:
At cold breath came from the northern air;
The leaves were scatter'd, the boughs were bare. ”

“ Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge; but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, "Come again, O beautiful youth!" so shall it never return again.
THE DEATH OF AN ANGEL.
The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the last hour, whom we harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. ”

“ Great Sammaël, the Angel of Death,
Takes through the town his flight!
Rabbi. Well, boy! now say, if thou art wise,
When the Angel of Death, who is full of eyes,
Comes where a sick man dying lies,
What doth he to the wight? ”

“ And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still! ”

“ It is not enough to reflect that, for each soul, dissolution has been the preliminary advent of Him who has promised to come again and receive us unto Himself, and the Angel of Death is indeed the Angel of the Covenant. ”

“ Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death
The second Death, that never dies,
That cannot die, when time is dead:
Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
Eternally uncomforted.
Dark Angel, with thine aching lust! ”

“ MY life is lived, and the wings of the Angel of Death overshadow me as I write; but before the last summons comes, I must obey the spirit within me that bids me tell of the things that I have seen, in order that the story of them shall not die, nor be disguised by false reports, as the years multiply and the mists gather over the graves of those who, with me, have seen and wrought them. ”

“ Where death, with grim and grisly aspect, stood by the mouth of an open grave, shaking his fatal dart, we see an angel form opening with one hand the gate of heaven, and holding in the other a shining [Pg 106] crown—from the face of God we see the features of an angry, stern, inexorable judge melt all away, and in room of an object of terror we behold the face and form of a kind, loving, forgiving Father, with open arms hastening to embrace us. ”

“ From 'A Study of Death,' 1895, by Harper and Brothers Death and Sleep
The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life. While the organism is alive as a human embodiment, death is present, having the same human distinction as the life, from which it is inseparable, being, indeed, the better half of living,--its winged half, its rest and inspiration, its secret spring of elasticity, and quickness. Life came upon the wings of Death, and so departs. ”

“ The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land: you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and two side-posts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on. ”

“ Happily, contentedly, and with the same sense of security with which an infant lays itself to sleep in its mother’s arms, do I lay myself down in the arms of the Angel Death. All the tremors, all the heart-shaking fears which have haunted me through a life that seems long as I look back upon it, have left me now; the storms have passed, and the Star of our Eternal Hope shines clear and steady on the horizon that seems so far from man, and yet is so very near to me tonight. ”

“ So are wont to be changed the faces of those who are dying.
Hot and red on his lips still burned the flush of the fever,
As if life, like the Hebrew, with blood had besprinkled its portals,
That the Angel of Death might see the sign, and pass over. ”

“ WISE MAN. My time to die has not come. I have my pupils. I have a young wife and children that I cannot leave. Why must I die?
ANGEL. You must die because no souls have passed over the threshold of heaven since you came into this country. The threshold is grassy, and the gates are rusty, and the angels that keep watch there are lonely.
WISE MAN. Where will death bring me to?
ANGEL. The doors of heaven will not open to you, for you have denied the existence of heaven; and the doors of purgatory will not open to you, for you have denied the existence of purgatory. ”

“ She thought that in such a moment one could wish to die, if the separation of the soul from the body could take place without pain; if, on a sudden, an angel could carry away on his wings our sentiments and our thoughts—sparks of ethereal fire, returning towards their source: death would then be, to use the expression, only a spontaneous act of the heart, a more ardent and more acceptable prayer. ”

“ As if the hermit were more immune from death than the hunter! Overhead hover fearful fire-breathing demons bearing beautiful women head downwards to their doom. Towards the centre of the entire picture, of which this forms but a half, sweeps Death, a sombre flying figure with a great scythe, whom cripples and the sorrowful invoke in vain; underneath are his slain, upon whose bodies swoop demons with long pitchforks and angels with long crosses, fighting furiously for the spoil, in a game of pull devil, pull angel. ”

“ The Angel of Death, say the Rabbis, holdeth his sword in his hand at the bed’s head, having on the end thereof three drops of gall, the sick man spying this deadly Angel, openeth his mouth with fear and then those drops fall in, of which one killeth him, the second maketh him pale, the third rotteth and putrifieth. ”

“ But if Christ upon His cross is meant for an object-lesson to His people, is it not reasonable to expect that His words spoken in those supreme moments should throw light upon that conformity to His death of which we are thinking? The words of the dying have always been received as revealing their true character. Death is the skeleton-key which opens the closed chambers of the soul, and calls forth the secret things--and in the presence of the "Death-Angel" men generally appear to be what they really are. Our Lord and Saviour was no exception to this universal rule. ”

“ When death is at hand, the leaf on which the dying man's name is inscribed falls to the ground, and is picked up by Azrael, the Angel of Death, who then proceeds to the abode of the sick man and awaits the parting of soul and body. The soul is supposed to come from the feet, upwards ”

“ How can death be an angel? Is any thing more terrible than death?"
"The phantom called death, which a diseased imagination conjures up, may be terrible to look upon; but death itself is a kind messenger, whose it is to summon us from this world of shadows and changes, to a world of eternal light and unfading beauty. But come, Mrs. Ellis ”

“ In “Christopher Van Sichem’s Bibels’ Tresoor,” 1646, 4to. there is a wood-cut of Death assisting Adam to dig the ground, partly copied from the subject of “the Curse,” in the work printed at Lyons.
In “De Chertablon, maniere de se bien preparer à la mort, &c.” Anvers, 1700, 4to. there is an allegorical print in which a man is led by his guardian angel to the dwelling of Faith, Hope, and Charity, but is violently seized by Death, who points to his last habitation, in the shape of a sepulchral monument. ”

“ She renounces him before Heaven, as if by that sacrifice to propitiate the powers above, and desires to be given entrance through death to that higher court where she still may intercede for him,—perhaps, when she is an angel, with better effect. She rises from prayer with the appearance of one upon whom already the hand of death is laid. ”

“ Had the Death Angel come in bodily form they could not have been more impressed. The wail for the dead, so they said, was heard all along the rivers, and no one even hoped for life when the slaughter was on. ”

“ The Death of the Strong Wicked Man is fearful and extravagant, and the flames in which the soul departs from the body have no warrant in the poem or in belief. The Descent of Christ into the Grave is formal and tame, and the hoary old Soul in the Death of the Good Man, travelling heavenward between two orderly Angels, required little outlay of fancy. The frontispiece—a naked Angel descending headlong and rousing the Dead with the Sound of the last Trumpet—alarmed the devout people of the north, and made maids and matrons retire behind their fans. ”

“ The unfortunate peasants, after much reflection, had come to the conclusion that death is not terrible, but that what is indubitably to be feared is the last agony—the difficult departure from terrestrial life. They decided, therefore, to come to the assistance of the Death Angel, and, when any sufferer approached the final struggle, his neighbours or relatives would carry him off to some isolated spot, tie up his head firmly but kindly in a cushion—and soon all was over. ”

“ The Angels left on guard now slowly return from Paradise to Heaven to report their failure, but are reminded by God that it was ordained; and the Son is sent down to judge the guilty pair, after hearing their excuses, and to punish them with the curses of toil and death. Meantime Sin and Death "snuff the smell of mortal change" on Earth, and leaving Hell-gate "belching outrageous flame," erect a broad road from Hell to Earth through Chaos, and as they come in sight of the World meet Satan steering his way back as an angel, "between the Centaur and the Scorpion." ”

“ During battles the devil is able to carry men off more easily, but then the angels also kill by Divine command, as the Old Testament bears witness, for there “one angel could cause the death of many persons.” ”

“ Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,—the dissolving body sank quietly towards his beloved,—tears of rapture broke the sunset light into a rosy, swimming sea,—distant echoing tones, as of the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and a thousand angels shone around. ”

“ It was there, everywhere, from margin to margin of the horizon. The earth, long empty, teemed with green life. Once more the pendulum of the seasons swung in its mighty arc, from death back to life. Life out of death, eternity rising from out dissolution. There was the lesson. Angele was not the symbol, but the PROOF of immortality. The seed dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth; rising again in life unconquerable, and in immaculate purity,—Angele dying as she gave birth to her little daughter, life springing from her death,—the pure, unconquerable, coming forth from the defiled. ”

“ Shall now be thine, and on thy funeral pyre
Such fatal woods shall burn, such chant shall sound,
That to thy ghost no more or magic song
Or spell shall reach, and thy Lethaean sleep
Shall never more be broken in a death
From me received anew: for such reward
Think not this second life enforced in vain.
Obscure may be the answers of the gods
By priestess spoken at the holy shrine;
But whose braves the oracles of death
In search of truth, should gain a sure response.
Then speak, I pray thee. Let the hidden fates
Tell through thy voice the mysteries to come. ”