Memento mori

“ Every memento mori comes with some force to me at seventy-seven, and I do pray most earnestly and devoutly to God, as my father did before me, that my body may not survive my mind, and that I may leave a tender not unpleasing recollection in their hearts. ”

“ The present, so full, so fearfully absorbing with the living, to the dead is a mystery; with those mouldering remains of man the past and the future are the great realities. The stillness, the uselessness if you will, of the old church-yard in the heart of the bustling city, renders it a more striking and impressive memento mori than the skull in the cell of a hermit. ”

“ He said that to look upon the dead should rather give pleasure than pain; that memento mori is a wise maxim, and looking upon the faces of the dead a good way of putting it in practice. I asked him if he had formed a theory as to a future life, and he said in substance that he had not ”

“ Our hearts, like muffled drums, are beating our funeral march to the grave. The sun will rise some morning soon, and streaming into our chamber, reveal our bodies cold and stiff and dead. The world will go about its business as usual and we will be laid away and forgotten. These hands of mine will wither; the flesh will fall from my face; my jaws, as though in grim humor over the folly of my life, will assume that horrible death's-head grin, and my whole body of which I am now so careful will become one fetid mass of corruption and decay. And my soul ”

“ 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. ”

“ And, like Amyntas, haunt the desert cells (And moneyless there breathe out thy cruelty) Where none but Care and Melancholy dwell. I, for revenge, to Nemesis will cry! If that will not prevail; my wandering ghost, Which breathless here this love-scorched trunk shall leave, Shall unto thee, with tragic tidings post! How thy disdain did life from soul bereave. Then, all too late, my death thou wilt repent! When murder's guilt, thy conscience shall torment.
SONNET XXV.
WHo doth not know that Love is triumphant, Sitting upon the throne of majesty? ”

“ In fact, my daughter is dead to us—dead: do you hear, Clémence, from this day you must begin to wear mourning for her in your heart—in your heart, so filled with maternal affection for her. Is our child buried under the marble of a tomb or under the vaults of a cloister—for us, what is the difference? From this day, do you understand, Clémence, we must regard her as dead. Besides, she is so very weak; her health, impaired by so much sorrow, by so many shocks, is so feeble. Why not that other death, still more complete? Fate is not weary. ”

“ Dark and melancholy, the fancies flitted across his brain like the visions of dead friends seen in the dim atmosphere of troubled sleep, and he revolved in his mind that bold cowardice of his ancestors, which taught them to fly from the sorrows and dangers of their fate, by the sure but gloomy passage of the tomb. Was it virtue, he asked himself, or vice? wisdom, or insanity, that allied the last despair to the last hope, and made self-murder the cure of other ills? And, as he thought, sorrow took arms against his better mind, and whispered like a friend, "Die! Die, Menenius! ”

“ As the shades of evening are approaching, the spectre of the doomed comes flitting before us, with a lighted taper in its hand, and with a solemn step halts not until it rests on its destined grave, in the church-yard ground. If dignities and fortune have been the earthly lot of this doomed mortal, then is there shadowed forth an awful pageantry of hearse and ghostly steeds, and mute mourners, all gliding away to the place of the tomb, and, like the phantoms of the Aensprecker, in Holland, (a funeral procession of no less fatality,) they foretell the doom of some ill-fated friend. ”

“ What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! ”

“ When we have watched through a long vigil with a great and agonizing sorrow, when we have rebelled against it, and battled and fought with the air, in our vain outcry against its injustice, when we have longed and wept and prayed for release in vain, and then, at last, have laid it in its ashes and stood beside that open grave, which yawns sooner or later in every past, then—the coming of its ghost is bitter with the bitterness of death. ”

“ You may talk and talk to the grief-stricken one who bends over the corpse in the coffin about death being a transition from a world of woe to a world of weal, and the distressed one may try to cherish the thought and proclaim belief, but the tears cease not to flow, the pain and anguish written upon every feature of the mourner refuse to give place to joy and gladness. ”

“ Death comes like a glimpse of thin blue sky through the fog of fight,
And the trident-flame of the mind fails, and the soul drinks night.
But on shores unknown it arises! it is white of its ancient scars.
Arrayed with stars as a garment, beneath night’s thick stars!
And now I must have died I think—and had this grace,
To look with new eyes for a moment, and to see one face
That fills my heart like a feasting where mailed kings break bread,
You are kind as a poor man’s alms, Lord, if I take this to the dead! ”

“ 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! ”

“ By this awful death, by the despair which has driven me to it, beware of leaving these doors. In your anger you swore to remain within these walls; in your remorse see that you keep that oath. Not for love, not for hatred, dare to cross the threshold, or I will denounce you in the grave where I shall be gone, and my curse shall be upon you.'
"He had risen in his passion as he uttered these words, but he sank back as he finished, and I thought he was dead. ”

“ One sees a ghastly figure of emaciation and decay; the eyes lying deep in their sockets, in a frightful stage of decomposition, and the whole frame exhibiting the power of death over the flesh of the Saints, but suggesting that, while patiently submitting to the worst that worms can do, it rests in hope and speaks out of the very grave—“I know that my Redeemer liveth.” ”

“ The demon was again at work beside her.
“Die!” said he. “It is but a blow—a moment's pang—the driving a needle into an artery—the prick of a pin upon the heart. Die! it will save you from exposure—the shame of bringing into the world an heir of shame! What would you live for? The doors of love, and fame, even of society, are shut against you for ever. What is life to you now? a long denial—a protracted draught of bitterness—the feeling of a death-spasm carried on through sleepless years ”

“ Death his death’s wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed;
I through the ample air in triumph high
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleased, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all my foes;
Death last, and with his carcase glut the grave ”

“ There had been some sort of bond between them till the vision of death rose before each shrinking soul. Shoulder to shoulder in crime, they fell apart as their doom approached; and rushing, shrieking, each man for himself, they one and all sought to escape by doors, windows or any outlet which promised release from this fatal spot. One rushed by me—I do not know which one—and I felt as if a flame from hell had licked me, his breath was so hot and the moans he uttered so like the curses we imagine to blister the lips of the lost. ”

“ Slowly, at last, came the step of the dead, heavily ascending the stairs;—he entered—I rushed to meet him, and the long pent up agony of my soul burst forth in madness uncontrolled. ‘Monster!—murderer!—destroyer of thy father and thy brother! why comest thou thus to torture and not kill? why is thy bloody hand for ever raised, and yet forbearing to fall? If thine aim be vengeance, strike—strike—strike—thou blood-bespotted horror! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet a few struggles, yet the throat-rattle, and the leaden hand of death choked the wounded man's last sigh, imprinted on his brow the seal of the last grief; gathering whole years of repentance into one rapid moment, in which the soul, tearing itself from the body, fears equally the tortures of life and of nothingness, feels at once all the gnawing of the past and all the agony of the future. ”

“ Dissolve my life, Let not my sence unsettle
Least I should drown, or stab or hang my self.
O state of Nature, fail together in me,
Since thy best props are warpt: So which way now?
The best way is, the next way to a grave:
Each errant step beside is torment. ”

“ 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? ”

“ This [Pg 273] reviving being, or oupire, comes out of his grave, or a demon in his likeness, goes by night to embrace and hug violently his near relations or his friends, and sucks their blood so much as to weaken and attenuate them, and at last cause their death. This persecution does not stop at one single person; it extends to the last person of the family, if the course be not interrupted by cutting off the head or opening the heart of the ghost, whose corpse is found in his coffin, yielding, flexible, swollen, and rubicund, although he may have been dead some time. ”

“ I wish to die with thee, if fate brings thy turn to perish first, and not to prolong my span of life at all, when once dismal death has cast thee to the tomb.
"For if thou chance to close thy eyes for ever, a victim to the maddened attack of the men-at-arms;—by whatsoever doom thy breath be cut off, by sword or disease, by sea or soil, I forswear every wanton and corrupt flame, and vow myself to a death like thine; that they who were bound by one marriage-union may be embraced in one and the same punishment. ”

“ When the body of a beloved dies we wail and lament, but when the soul dies in sin we shed never a tear. Yet what so dreadful as spiritual death! Natural death is sad, murder deplorable, but suicide worst of all, and the soul that sins commits spiritual suicide. ”

“ You see it, indeed, in all its varieties now in the rare and [226] fading beauty which it wears just after the spirit has fled from the clay, when its repose seems the worn-out casket, which the soul has broken, and thrown away; now, when there is shed over it a hue of the sublime, and it is carried amid the tears to burial, and now, when corruption has begun its work, and its ill odor affects the neighborhood, and spreads the pestilence—you see it in all its varieties, but uniformly death is there. We gather from our melancholy pilgrimage no vestige of spiritual life. ”

“ In a shroud of mourning liest thou among the woes,
My senses in a horrid darkness trapped expire.
Thy hands are bound, my freedom’s gone; eternal throes
Of death have chained my mind upon a funeral pyre. ”

“ That sinister countenance seemed to him to presage some approaching calamity.
Thus, there are men whom fate has marked on the forehead with a fatal stamp. The mysterious sign is not displayed at every time and before all; but at certain epochs of life, when the unknown breath caresses the predestinated or cursed head, the mark all at once appeals, like a tawny light in the depth of night.
A curse! Fatality has moulded that man's brain, it has left its potent impress on his skull. ”

“ The very ashes of the dead seem to be disturbed at the thought that his injuries are to pass unrevenged. The horrors which are supposed to haunt the bed of the murderer, the ghosts which, superstition imagines, rise from their graves to demand vengeance upon those who brought them to an untimely end, all take their origin from this natural sympathy with the imaginary resentment of the slain. ”