Dead

“ Only the dead with hands uplifted, the dead in frozen rest, the dead with the smile of death, or the hate of death, or the terror of death written upon their faces, seemed to watch and to wait in the chamber of the sepulchre. ”

“ The dead rise up to see thee, they breathe the air and they look upon thy face when the disk riseth on its horizon; their hearts are at peace, inasmuch as they behold thee, O thou who art eternity and everlastingness. ”

“ He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him
How could that be—I thought the dead were souls,
He broke my trance. Don’t that make you suspicious
That there’s something the dead are keeping back?
Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back. ”

“ I come, and bow down here.
With eyes all vaguely motionless,
Perhaps my wanderings view
The dead, with horror and distress,
As, roused up in their resting-place,
They look their dark walls through. ”

“ Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dead, and at full length he lay, enshrouded—the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in our merriment as the dead may take in the merriment of those who are to die. ”

“ And the dead drove the living from the streets.
And all about me stalked the shrouded dead,
Dead hopes, dead efforts, loves and sorrows dead,
With empty orbits groping for their dead
In that blind mustering of murdered faiths . . . ”

“ 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! ”

“ GRIEF FOR THE DEAD.
O hearts that never cease to yearn!
O brimming tears that ne'er are dried! The dead, though they depart, return
As though they had not died!
The living are the only dead;
The dead live,—nevermore to die; And often, when we mourn them fled,
They never were so nigh!
And though they lie beneath the waves,
Or sleep within the churchyard dim, (Ah! through how many different graves
God's children go to him!) —
Yet every grave gives up its dead
Ere it is overgrown with grass ”

“ THE INFLUENCE OF THE DEAD.
Who are the Spirits watching by the dead?
Faith, from whose eyes a solemn light is shed;
And Hope, with far-off sunshine on the head.
The influence of the dead is that of Heaven ”

“ But lives and grows
Within us as a penetrating ray
Of sunshine on a crystal surface glows
With many-hued refraction. He has fled
Into the unknown silence of the night,
But cannot die till human hearts are dead. ”

“ I held the tiny body like a leaf
All day and night within my arms; and so,
Close nestled to my yearning heart, Death passed,
As merciless as God, but left that look
Of two dead loves, as if Death's self knew pity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As dumbly pleading to be comforted,—
But bent their blinded vision on the dead:
⁠The dead removed—how far!—from human sighs,
⁠Lying majestic, as a conqueror lies,
Indifferent to tears, so costly shed. ”

“ She stared, with a great visible fall. "But if he's one of your Dead?"
"He's one of the world's, if you like—he's one of yours. But he's not one of mine. Mine are only the Dead who died possessed of me. ”

“ 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 dead appeal to us by the mesmeric agency of their immortality; they throw out, through every movement of the world’s circumstances and events, a suggestion of their needs, their condition, and their destiny. ”

“ Hie thee back, thou find'st not here Corpse or coffin, grave or bier; The Dead Alive is gone and fled— Go thou, and join the Living Dead! 'The Living Dead, whose sober brow Oft shrouds such thoughts as thou hast now, Whose hearts within are seldom cured Of passions by their vows abjured ”

“ Such familiarity with death may harden some natures—surely there was the semblance of utter callousness of heart in many such scenes, where dead men were hurried into the graves with scarce a foot of earth above the rotting clay. ”

“ He dares not lay polluted hands upon the dead, whose becalmed face is looking up to thee. The dead, the sacred dead. The living are for the world, the dead are Thine. Incense, and prayer, and psalms for the departed. ”

“ Still tend their garden-bower,
And call them back, the holy Dead,
To each lone hour!
The holy Dead!—oh! blest we are,
That we may name them so,
And to their spirits look afar,
Through all our woe! ”

“ There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death. She is not dead,—the child of our affection,— But gone unto that school Where she no longer needs our poor protection, And Christ himself doth rule. ”

“ Who is dead? And the same answer will come, "Behold, a dead man is carried out," and that will be you. Nothing is more commonplace than to say that we must all die, and nothing is less realised and taken to heart and acted upon. ”

“ No, no, madam, the nearer you come to it, you see that death is a dark and dusty corner, where a man gets into his tomb and has the door shut after him till the judgment day. I have few friends just now, and once I am dead I shall have none. ”

“ As the day of my death draws nearer, the intense horror that all living flesh feels toward escaped spirits from beyond the grave grows more and more powerful. It is an awful thing to go down quick among the dead with scarcely one-half of your life completed. ”

“ Looking down upon the dead face, touching the cold hand, lifting up the leaden arm, one cannot help feeling how utterly dead a dead man looks, an impression enormously deepened, as a rule, by the circumstances of the last days. ”

“ Shall we either put them to death on the spot—which, perhaps, would be the wisest plan, as the dead are very silent—or shall we send them, bound hand and foot, to your chateau, that you may give them your own directions as to what they are to say and do? ”

“ We talk about the dead by our fire-sides.
And then for our immortal part, we want
No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the mountains:
LEONARD. Your dalesmen, then, do in each other's thoughts
Possess a kind of second life: no doubt
You, Sir, could help me to the history
Of half these Graves? ”

“ Rest once was theirs, who had crossed the mortal brink:
⁠No rest, no reverence now: dull fools undress
⁠Death's holiest shrine, life's veriest nakedness.
ii.
A man was born, sang, suffered, loved, and died.
⁠Men scorned him living: let us praise him dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The pious tones which once with a holy inspiration had gushed from the pure fount of his soul—tones to which he had himself listened in silent devotion but a few weeks before,—resounded now in mourning over his grave; and sad and sorrowful, though at the same time sweetly consolatory, still echo far and wide to the hearts of all:
“Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord, now and for ever. ”

“ I shall have more to say when I am dead. ”

“ The dead take sudden majesty. They become as gods. We think they hear us when we speak of them, and their good becomes sacred. A dead face [Pg 163] has all human faults wiped from it; and that Shape, that Presence, whose passiveness seems infinite, how it fills the house, the town, the whole world, while it stays! ”

“ Wide, as a world to embrace;
And last, and grandest, the lure, the invitation,
And sacred wooing of death;
Unto what regions, or heavens, or solemn spaces,
Who, but by dying, can tell?
BEAUTIFUL LIE THE DEAD
Beautiful lie the dead ”

“ 75Dear, was it really you and I?
In truth the riddle’s ill to read,
So many are the deaths we die
Before we can be dead indeed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For how can they be after death if they be in death, especially when we do not even call them dying, as we call those in sleep, sleeping; and those in languor, languishing; and those in grief, grieving; and those in life, living? And yet the dead, until they rise again, are said to be in death, but cannot be called dying. ”

“ Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,
And whether he's slow, or spry,
It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts
But only—how did you die? ”

“ Men pass my grave, and say, "'Twere well to sleep, Like such an one, amid the uncaring dead!" How should they know the vigils that I keep, The tears I shed? ”

“ If Death Is Kind
Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free. ”

“ Yet answered naught; but lowly said-- ⁠120
'And death?'--'Why beat the bush in thee?
It is the cunningest mystery:
Alive thou know'st not death; and, dead,
Death thou'lt not know.'--'The grave will test ”