Dead reckoning

“ A shot, a cry, a struggle, and a fainting woman's kiss;
Life's blood let 'mid the grasses—and all a world was lost,
And no one may ever know how he paid the cost.
He is lost in the crowd of the dead, in the night-time of death,
A name on a stone left to tell that he ever drew breath.
So desperate body die there, with your soul's long release,
And, unhappy spirit, God grant you Eternity's peace! ”

“ Demons that circle under the wave,
Why are ye howling over my grave?
Back, ye fiends, back again, to the unknown;
I am a dead thing: leave me alone.
Cold are my limbs and departed my breath;
I am not living, but this is not death. ”

“ And he appeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.
As always, the image of the dead man solaced him immediately and banished from his mind the things which had just preoccupied him. His uneasiness became composed, his bitterness disappeared, and his repugnance gave place to a new sensation of tranquil security. What had he to fear? Why did his imagination exaggerate so childishly the suffering which awaited him and which henceforth was inevitable? ”

“ And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,—all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,—struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,—this dream where such resurrections were possible. ”

“ At first blush—to use a common and sensible expression—there seems no respectable keeping, between the art of burying the dead, and that of feasting the living. Depositing those, whom we love, in their graves, is certainly the very last relish for an appetite. ”

“ He was in the pit of dejection, which lies on the far side of the elevation of factitious excitement—a place of darkness, where the scorpions of conscience sting to madness, and every thought that rises in the gloomy, bewildered mind appears like a ghost that walks at midnight over open graves and bones of the dead. ”

“ Whenever it came, a heavy, numbing throb seemed to take hold of my heart, and say, 'Dead-dead-dead.' And I cried out, 'The living, the living shall praise Thee, O God; the dead cannot praise thee. There is no work in the grave; in the night no man can work. ”

“ All is dull, cold and dreary before me, until I also can escape to the region where there is no bereavement, no blasting root and branch, no rending of the heart-strings. What is aught to me, in the midst of this all-pervading, thrilling torture, when all I want is to be dead? ”

“ But this is fearsome, to die that my body may become the home of the ghost of a dead man, who perchance, having entered it, will abide there, leaving my spirit houseless, or perchance will shut up the doors of my heart in such fashion that they never can be opened. ”

“ He can count separately how many of his soul's affections the knife she stabbed it with has slain, how many yet mourn over the tombs which he has built for these: he can tell, too, of some that still watch around his bed, bright sometimes with ecstatic passion of melancholy and crowning his mournful head with vine. All these living forgive her transgressions: when will she look upon them, that the dead may live again? ”

“ Do the dead return? Are the dead indeed dead? You have nailed down the coffin-lid; you have seen the coffin as it sunk into the grave; you have heard the rattling of the clod,—but is that all? Is the beloved one whom you have given to the grave, indeed dead, or only more truly living in a new body, formed of refined matter, invisible to our gross organs? Is that which we call soul, only the result of a particular organization of gross matter, or is it the real, eternal substance of which all other matter is but the servant and the expression? Do the dead return? ”

“ Some fling themselves prostrate beside the corpse and sob as if their very hearts would break. They take the dead man by the hand, they stroke him, they straighten out the poor feet which are already growing cold. ”

“ The belief in ghosts did not help me any; for that ghost and spirit were synonyms, never once struck my mind. To the innumerable questions propounded by me to my elders, in the expectation of eliciting satisfactory replies, the old stereotyped response was given,—to wit: Mankind have souls, and these souls live when the body is dead and returned into the dust of the ground; but what the soul was, whence it came, what was its nature, form, shape and size, and whither it went after the loss of its body, I could gain not the slightest information ”

“ If there yet lingered one feeling of delicacy to prompt him to delay his confession for a little, until the dead was buried, until something of the horror of the sudden death had yielded to time, should it not be removed by the knowledge of her misery, which he had it in his power to dissipate and turn to gladness? Why should she weep? Why should she feel one instant of pain, when he could change her tears to smiles, her grief to joy? ”

“ Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that from this pursuer, living or dead—obdurate and imperturbable before her in his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and imperturbable in his coffin-bed—there is no escape but in death. ”

“ They dread the return of the dead man’s spirit, and do all they can to avoid it by shifting their camp after a death, ceasing for ever to pronounce the name of the departed, and eschewing everything that might be regarded as an evocation or recall of his soul. ”

“ If we analyse our own feelings on the death of those we love, we shall probably find that, except in cases where life is prematurely shortened and much promise cut off, pity for the dead person is rarely a marked element. The feelings which had long been exclusively concentrated on the sufferings of the dying man take a new course when the moment of death arrives. It is the sudden blank; the separation from him who is dear to us; the cessation of the long reciprocity of love and pleasure,—in a word our own loss,—that affects us then. ”

“ I felt assured on the instant that I had found the dead man—the old prophecy recurred to my memory—a strange yearning sorrow, a vague foreboding of ill, an inexplicable terror, as I thought of the poor lad who was awaiting my return in the distant town, struck through me with a chill of superstitious dread, robbed me of my judgment and resolution, and left me when I had at last recovered myself, weak and dizzy, as if I had just suffered under some pang of overpowering physical pain. ”

“ Does a dead Man talk and walk? I wish I may never meet with more frightful Ghosts than you are. Pa.Ay, indeed, you make a Jest of it; but for all that, you kill poor me, and more cruelly too, than if you stuck a Dagger in my Breast. For now I, poor Wretch as I am, die a lingering Death. Ma.Prithee tell me, how many Women with Child have miscarried at the Sight of thee? Pa.My Paleness shews I have no more Blood in my Body than a Ghost. ”

“ The dead must bury their dead. And, thus pondering from personal to general thoughts, the turmoil of his feelings gradually calmed, and a restful melancholy, vague and tender, filled the aching void in his heart. ”

“ And of the touching piety of the living toward the dead? There is no joyful occasion where the dead are not called to our remembrance, and their blessing and the blessing of heaven invoked. In joy and in sorrow, we think of our dead always. ”

“ So a dead man, for the single reason that he is dead, does not repel me, and, though I knew that there was no hope that this man was alive, still, for decency's sake, I felt his pulse, and, while I kept my ears alert for any sound from the floors above me, I pulled open his shirt and placed my hand upon his heart. ”

“ BURIAL ALIVE.—CREMATION FROM AN ÆSTHETIC AND RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW. Our great American poet, Edgar Allan Poe, says: “To be buried alive is beyond question the most terrific of all extremes which have ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”
Is any death more horrible than this? To be embraced, unprepared, down in the deep dark grave! To awake again with the greatest longing for life, suffering the most severe bodily tortures, in the coffin! To realize that there is no escape from inevitable death! ”

“ I would live to repent: to expiate one, the deepest, darkest, let me live; p. 160I dare not die. My father!—I overheard his arrangements with thee—I could not bear to lose—he was found dead on his couch—I smothered him in the night. Mercy, mercy! O Eustace! let me live,—I am not fit to die!’ But his words raised a wilder fiend in my soul, that scared away the spirit of mercy. He then had been the monster—he!—I raved aloud, ‘Murderer! thou art not fit to live—hell gapes for thee—begone!’ I drew my dagger across his throat ”

“ So for a few moments they sat wrestling with the dull ghosts of that broken house, the mournful phantasms that were not dead long enough to be happy, for death is sorrowful at first and for a long time, but afterwards the dead are contented and learn to shape themselves anew. ”

“ The desire is almost universal, that, when summoned to lie down in the grave, the dead may never be disturbed, by the hand of man—that our remains may return quietly to dust—unobserved by mortal eye. There is no part of this humiliating process, that is not painful and revolting to the beholder. Of this the ancients had the same impression. Cremation and embalming set corruption and the worm at defiance. ”

“ His only definite sensations are despair and the sense of his personal loss, and these declare themselves in regular bands of brown-grey and leaden grey, while the very curious downward protrusion, which actually descends into the grave and enfolds the coffin, is an expression of strong selfish desire to draw the dead man back into physical life. ”

“ As one might feel who had buried himself yet living—who had pulled the coffin-lid down on his own head, and heard the devils eagerly filling the grave up and laughing at their work—and at each new shovelful of heavy clay had felt the distance between him and life grow shorter, and felt the weight press heavier and heavier, and the horror and the darkness grow tighter and tighter around him, and the remorse, and the helplessness, and the terror—so I felt that hideous night, and so I feel whenever I remember it. ”

“ My dead must come to me, and have come to me—or so I believe.
The return of the dead is the eternal riddle of the living. Although mediums have been exposed since the beginning of time, and so-called "spiritualism" has fallen into disrepute over and over again, it emerges triumphantly in spite of charlatans, and once more becomes the theme of the hour. ”

“ Thus the tears, Scripture reading, badges of mourning, and even the expense tend to reef in our sense of our dead friend’s personality and to make it powerless to project ghostly phantasms, because such ceremonials are cathartic and preventative of all such hallucinations. ”

“ I fight thee, in the Holy Name!
Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith:
Tempter! should I escape thy flame,
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. ”

“ While with my friends, from whom the change separated me, I was, so far as frail mortals in my condition of bodily health can be, quite happy and contented—contented to endure, with all possible patience, that for which there was no medicament, no remedy; and, all things considered, satisfied I lived, and in the self-same spirit died. Died? No; I am not dead!—bodies change; souls can never die. Why? For the reason that God, who, like human beings, is intelligent and immortal, can Himself be never blotted out of being. He is Mind, Memory, Love, and Will, not one of which can ever perish ”

“ He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his latest breath, "I am better now." Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas and tears and fears that these dear words are true of all the countless dead. ”

“ But the souls of the dead were also believed to return from the spirit land for other purposes than to be born again in the flesh. They might come as ghosts to haunt and torment the living, and as such they were greatly dreaded by the people. ”

“ So perhaps a man buried alive and awakening in his coffin might beat upon its lid and struggle to fling it off, though of course reason might convince him that all his efforts would be useless; but the trouble is that it is not a question of reason, it is a question of nerves. ”

“ Not a living soul, not an animal, stirred abroad. All without was solitude, all within was silence. Encouraged by the universal stillness Death emerged from his lair, and his brother was just about to catch him, when some children, who had ventured out to herd their goats, saw Death and cried out. ”

“ There was something so horrible about the sight of this awe-inspiring woman letting loose her passion on the dead—so much more horrible even than anything that had gone before—that I could no longer bear to look at it, and, turning, began to creep, shaking as I was in every limb, slowly along the pitch-dark passage, feeling in my trembling heart that I had seen a vision of a Soul in Hell. ”

“ If the ravings, and rantings, the drunkenness, and the bloody brawls, that have sometimes occurred, during the celebration of an Irish wake, have proved unavailing, in raising the dead, or in exciting the lethargic soul—they have, certainly, sometimes sufficed, to restore consciousness to the cataleptic, who were supposed to be dead, and about to be committed to the grave. ”