Memento

“ 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. ”

“ For though its memento mori, too constantly before us, would either sadden or brutalize, as we were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good to see the end of ourselves, and to study the meaning and lesson of our lives in those of our prototypes and elder likenesses. ”

“ 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 ”

“ On every side are mementos of a happy past, and all, though mute, speaking to me in a language whose power stirs the depths of my soul. Wherever the eye may turn, it meets with a silent greeting from an old friend, and the whole shrouded in a weird gloom that lends to the most common object an air of melancholy mystery. ”

“ The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest objects, in fact, as a general thing, were the bravest, the tenderest mementos, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home, but not worthy of the temple—dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced, gods. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The evils that are past, perhaps, when too late, you may wish to recal; the young creature you have persecuted, perhaps, when too late, you may regret that you have destroyed;-you may think with horror of the deceptions you have practised, and the pangs of remorse may follow me to the tomb:-Oh, Belmont, all my resentment softens into pity at the thought! what will become of thee, good Heaven, when, with the eye of penitence, thou reviewest thy past conduct! ”

“ The shameful praises of the callers are lies; the pompous funeral is a lie; the grandiloquent funeral oration is a lie, for they all attribute to the dead virtues he never had. They all give honor where honor is not due. Nay, the lie follows him to the very edge of the grave in the inscription on his tombstone; nay, into the grave in the bright breast-plate on his coffin; nay, beyond the grave, for his soul has gone to dwell forever with that liar and father of lies — the devil. ”

“ The manner in which I hope to pass through the brief, but dark and bitter passage lying between me and the grave will, I trust, be a sufficient answer to the taunt of cowardice, and the future vindication of my innocence, not for my own, but my wife and children's sake, I confidently leave them to Him into whose hands I shall soon, untimely, render up my spirit. ”

“ The witnesses are summoned; and the whole universe swarms to the trial. His memory is a torment; and all the forces of his mind suddenly concentrate in memory,—the memory of one deed, or of many deeds, even as his sin has been sole or manifold. What torment, old man, is like the torment of one whose memory is confined wholly to his evil deeds!"
No one made any reply. The anguish of the man's speech made response impossible. ”

“ Think of the men she has charmed! Think of the old, sad romance of her betrayal! I dare say it was some gladiator, or an actor. Ah, the misery of the years! And now contemplate her beauty in its decay: the night must be very dark, or the stranger very soused. Observe that sepulchral wreck of what once was a human face. ”

“ Both the just and the wicked, when their days are fulfilled, must die. Between their bodies in the grave thee is no visible difference; between the souls of the one and the other, in the world of spirits, thee is a vast difference, and so there is, or ought to be, between their memories, which survive them. ”

“ To the wretch hardened in crimes, and growing grey in the pursuits of villany, the recollection of having actually deprived a fellow-creature of existence, the divine gift of the Creator, must ever crowd his imagination with a load of the most intolerable ideas. How then can any power of language express the multiplied pains of my situation, the pangs of remorse which swell in my bosom, with the most heart-rending sensations ou the remembrance of the past, through an unpremeditated and deeply-lamented act, which has led to this investigation. ”

“ And yet if there was actual, material truth, superadded to reverie, would such objectors sympathize the more? No! a thousand times, no; the heart that has no sympathy with thoughts and feelings that scorch the soul, is dead also—whatever its mocking tears, and gestures may say—to a coffin or a grave! ”

“ And of Heaven and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth,
And then I changed my pipings,
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! ”

“ What, thought I, as I lay awake,—what if, instead of this conjugal contretemps, I had been wrongly seized for theft and murder, and unable to prove an alibi? Such cases have been. Such cases have been! Why, they have taken place by scores—are taking place, and will to the end of the chapter. And my imagination vividly portrayed the mental agonies of the innocent convict. Memory ransacked the dusty tomes of history to supply fresh food for meditation, fresh fuel to feed my horror. ”

“ In the vast archives of human torment the narrative fills but a brief paragraph; and therein all that pitiful history, to the last secret tear and the last act of malice, to the last noble self-denial and unanswered prayer, is recorded, to endure for time. ”

“ He will imitate the grave tones and visage of the magistrate, the piteous appeals, the cries and groans and contortions of the victim under torture, the angry or grumbling voice of the husband, the shrill falsetto of the scolding shrew or the shower of tears and the piteous appeals of the wife. Smiles, frowns, surprise, sorrow, and all the emotions are simulated, and the accompaniment of voice is kept up with jokes, puns, bon-mots, irony, or well-expressed pathos. ”

“ Merope
str. 1
What shall I bear, O lost
Husband and King, to thy grave?—
Pure libations, and fresh
Flowers? But thou, in the gloom,
Discontented, perhaps,
Demandest vengeance, not grief?
Sternly requirest a man,
Light to spring up to thy house?
The Chorus
str. 2.
Vengeance, O Queen, is his due,
His most just prayer; yet his house—
If that might soothe him below—
Prosperous, mighty, came back
In the third generation, the way
Order'd by Fate, to their home; [366]
And now, glorious, secure,
Fill the wealth-giving thrones
Of their heritage, Pelops' isle.
Merope
ant. ”

“ My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the high'st degree,
Murder, stern murder, in the dir'st degree;
All several sins, all us'd in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all,—Guilty! guilty!
I shall despair.—There is no creature loves me;
And, if I die, no soul will pity me. ”

“ Let not an act accompanied with a meanness—oh that I should say the word!—a meanness and a cruelty that give the lie to your whole life—make even a grateful remembrance of you an unworthy sin. When I kneel within the walls that divide me from the world, oh, let me think that I can pray for you as the noblest being that the world contains! ”

“ Periodically I send out a circular to all the recognized poets of the land, begging them in the name of God to be less mortuary, but it never does any good. More, I doubt that it ever will—or any other sort of appeal. Take away death and love and you would rob poets of both their liver and their lights ”

“ If you set a value on finery look into that grave; behold the moldering body of my Betsy, who now says to Corruption, thou art my father, and to the worm, thou art my mother, and my sister. Look to the bloody and brainless head of her husband. ”

“ Then our thoughts of thy goodness, which love oft repeats,
May vibrate in thy bosom, though lost be thy face.
Thy life was a martyrdom: noble the part
Of self-abnegation thou playd'st for the Poor;
Whose gratitude fixes thy name in each heart,
Where in Memory's shrine 'twill for ever endure. ”

“ Die—if such be your wish—your death would be a benefit both to the world and me. Since I have heard the prince's accusations and your subsequent confessions, I feel as though surrounded by an atmosphere of crimes and treachery, which terrifies and oppresses my mind with the fearful apprehension of becoming myself infected with its black wickedness, and I shudder, lest in time I might become as guilty as yourself ”

“ Even the Man of Sorrows, cradled in a manger and done to death between two thieves, is seen, as we part from Him at last, in a situation of stupendous magnificence, with infinite power in His hands. Even the Beatitudes, in the midst of their eloquent counselling of renunciation, give it unimaginable splendor as its reward. ”

“ What enchanted us most was the beauty of that thought, that the ancients had recognized death as the brother of sleep, and had represented them similar, even to confusion, as becomes Menaechmi. Here we could first do high honor to the triumph of the beautiful, and banish the ugly of every kind into the low sphere of the ridiculous within the realm of art, since it could not be utterly driven out of the world. ”

“ Even on the false supposition that he is referring simply to his behaviour at the grave, he can hardly say, I suppose, ‘You ranted so abominably that you put me into a towering passion.’ Whatever he said, it would have to be more or less untrue. ”

“ But we grow used to everything. Custom destroys sensations. Death and its mysteries, the horrible, and all its threatening shapes soon present nothing to our eyes but worn-out pictures. He accustomed himself to contemplate without emotion this lugubrious ruin. As before, the frenzy seized him and shook him before the skull. ”

“ As for remorse—the memory of any former sin—a life so austerely blameless, a disposition so prompt to the activity of good, and so enamoured of its beauty—a mind so cultivated, a temper so gentle, and a heart so easily moved—all would have forbidden, to natures far more suspicious than Madeline’s, the conception of such a thought. ”

“ In reality, such remembrances are rather unpleasant: every sin, every evil thought, may, like a clock with alarm or chimes, be repeated at pleasure; then the question is if we can trust ourselves to give an account of every unbecoming word in our heart and on our lips. ”

“ The memory of the grave into which he had gazed so steadily on the execution morning, into which, as he feels, one half of himself had then descended, does not lessen his shrinking from the fate before him, yet fortifies him to face it manfully, gives a sort of fraternal familiarity to death ”

“ One traces, in chapter after chapter, the ebb and flow of human ideas upon the subject, of the human attitude to the last and greatest mystery of them all—the notion of it as a mere transition to a higher plane of life, the notion of it as a benign panacea for all human suffering, the notion of it as an incentive to this or that way of living, the notion of it as an impenetrable enigma, inevitable and inexplicable. Few of us quite realize how much the contemplation of death has colored human thought throughout the ages. ”

“ By yielding to the sway of their credulous fancies, allowing their passions to be worked up to a tremendous pitch of excitement, and running into excesses of folly and violence, they have left a dark stain upon their memory, that will awaken a sense of shame, pity, and amazement in the minds of their latest posterity. ”

“ All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest and the last, is dead:
Rise, Memory, and write its praise!
Up—to thy wonted work! come, trace
The epitaph of glory fled,
For now the earth has changed its face,
A frown is on the heaven’s brow. ”

“ But grave persons and men of circumspection, pondering the circumstances of things fetched deep sighs from the bottom of their hearts, to see all strangers so much in request, and the subjects of the realm reputed as vile, which they took for a token of their irreparable ruin. ”

“ He imagines that the grave must of necessity be a bitter and terrible prospect, and is willing to cheer me with hopes, whether they prove true or false: as all doctors do; it is in their trade. But he knows perfectly well that I must die. ”

“ What must it be when that image loves, feels, and suffers! When it speaks to us in tones that thrill the inmost heart? When we see it quiver and bleed under the lashes of the executioner--when the sweat of agony trickles from the brow and real tears flow from the eyes? ”

“ There are some who, from terror, anticipate the hand of the executioner; and he who was unbound that his pardon might be read to him, was found stark dead on the scaffold solely from the stroke of his imagination. We sweat, we tremble, we turn pale, and we blush at the assaults of our imagination, and, sunk in a feather-bed, feel our bodies shaken by their commotion, sometimes even to death. ”