Oblivion

“ I shall rise from the death-world, beloved, to find it A kerchief /or tears in that far land of gloom. But thought of oblivion shall never, oh never Weigh low on my spirit, or cause me to grieve, For my love will be with thee for ever and ever, And live while eternity's eyeles shall live. ”

“ This time, these hundreds and thousands of years, how they mock at our frail edifices! how Oblivion triumphs in every part of the earth, with ruins crumbling beneath her feet! and Destruction, while with unfeeling malignity she tramples every form of life in the dust! ”

“ So, in the second chapter of the book of Wisdom, 'Our body shall become dust and ashes.' It follows, that after these passages of mortal life, oblivion shall be our portion—we, and our deeds, alike shall be forgotten. ”

“ He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave. ”

“ Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. ”

“ To lie in dead oblivion, losing half
The fleeting moments of too short a life;
Total extinction of th' enlightened soul!
Or else to feverish vanity alive, ⁠75
Wildered, and tossing thro' distemper'd dreams?
Who would in such a gloomy state remain
Longer than Nature craves; ”

“ She replied:
“Nay. Earth be a home of sorrow’s dream. For sorrow be but dream of the soul asleep. ’Tis wake (death) that setteth free.”
And after such assurance comes the cry of faith and content and peace:
279Then do I cease to clutch the emptiness,
And sleep, and sleep me unafeared! With this comforting assurance in mind one may cheerfully approach her solemn address to Death:
Who art thou,
Who tracketh ’pon the path o’ me—
O’ each turn, aye, and track?
Thou! And thou astand! ”

“ How the deep shadows of impenetrable mystery hang about the dread portals of eternity; how, in approaching them, even in thought, we lose ourselves in clouds, and grope in thick darkness!
In the near and solemn contemplation of the awful change which awaits us all, how eagerly does the soul receive everything, in religion, philosophy, or personal experience, which lifts, or seems to lift, even a little way, a corner of the vast curtain which hides from our mortal view the spirit-realm to which we go ”

“ Through darkness was I to make the last journey towards that dread bourne whence no traveller returns? The slow death in the darkness, drifting about on the bitter waters of that secret sea—that was the thought that my soul revolted from. And strange thoughts, horrible thoughts, a man thinks placed as I was. At times his reason leaves him, his whole soul rises in impious revolt, and the devil rages freely therein, as if already his victim’s bed were made in hell. ”

“ When Death no longer makes the grave his home;
When waking spirits leave their earthly rest
To mix for ever with the damn'd or blest;
When years, in drowsy thousands counted by,
Are hung on minutes with their destiny:
When Time in terror drops his draining glass,
And all things mortal, like to shadows, pass,
As 'neath approaching tempests sinks the sun—
When Time shall leave Eternity begun.
Life swoon'd in terror at that hour's dread birth ”

“ And over the seething darkness, full of all formless horrors and half-discerned dead monstrosities, over all the chaos of disordered wills, rebellious appetites, stinging conscience, darkened perceptions, there will come, if we will (and we may will by His help, which is never far away from us) , gently, but quickening us into life and reducing confusion into order, and flooding our cloudy night with light, that divine Spirit. The dove that brooded over Chaos and made it Cosmos, will brood over your nature, and re-create the whole. ”

“ The delights and pains of the flesh, the agonies and raptures of the soul, these are fragmentary meteors fallen from thought’s harmonious system. But these burning experiences—how in any sense can they be mere pieces of thought’s heaven? For, if the fall is real, there is a world outside thought’s region, and, if the fall is apparent, then human error itself is not included there. ”

“ Yet die it may, and leave thee blameless. The time may come when that bosom, now thy Elysium, will awaken not, with all its heaving beauty, one single passionate or adoring sigh. Those eyes, that now stream agitation and bliss into thy throbbing heart, may, on some not very distant day, be cold to thy imagination as the distant and unheeded stars. That voice, now thrilling through every nerve, may fall on thy ear a disregarded sound. Other hopes, other fears, other troubles, may possess thee wholly—and that more than angel of Heaven seem to fade away into a shape of earth's most common clay. ”

“ We walk to the verge of the valley of the shadow of death with those we love; but there our steps are stayed, and we look into the black void with wonder and despair. Oh! faith! if ye come not then to the rescue, that death is eternal. ”

“ So darkness drops between the days, an interlude
When night's low sighing stirs the sleepy solitude.
So, when the little cycle of this life is rounded,
Before the spirit enters into life unbounded,
It waits to hear, with bated breath,
The solemn interlude of death. ”

“ Out from the boughs of the old tree came the shriek of a lost spirit,— one of those strange, appalling sounds of human agony which, once heard, are never forgotten. It is as the wail of Hope, when SHE, too, rushes forth from the Coffer of Woes, and vanishes into viewless space; it is the dread cry of Reason parting from clay, and of Soul, that would wrench itself from life! ”

“ But when we have the cloud without the bow,—when outer trials come to a soul in spiritual unrest and trouble,—when we harbour the suspicion that the only Being who could befriend in such an hour has Himself hidden His face,—when we have neither this world nor the next to comfort us—smitten hopes for time and despairing hopes for eternity!—this is the woe of woes—the "horror of great darkness,"—"deep calleth unto deep." ”

“ In this our hour of darkness, when thou hast made the earth to tremble and the mountains thereof to shake, be thou, O God, their refuge and their strength and their present help in trouble.
“And for as much as thou alone canst bring light out of darkness and good out of evil, let the light of thy loving countenance shine upon them through the cloud; let the angel of thy presence be with them in their sorrow, to comfort and support them, giving strength to the weak, courage to the faint and consolation to the dying. ”

“ When I went under the earth in the darkness like the dead, and caught only a distant sound of the loved ones and of spring above me, why was my feeble heart in fear that there was no more hope for life and light? ”

“ Would Death were come! since Life is nought but pain.”
He ceas’d. Throughout the great plain, far and wide,
Silence. Throughout the sky and lonely air,
Silence. There was not any that replied;
And Death, for all his ranging, came not there. ”

“ Think not the terrors of this night are the delusion of a dream or the snare of a vision! Thou art awake,—not sleeping,—thou art flesh as well as spirit! This place is neither hell nor heaven nor any space between,—it is a corner of thine own world on which thou livest. ”

“ I recall thinking of those heads, and the bulging eyes they must contain; eyes that might well reflect all the fright, panic, and delirium of a malignant universe—all the sorrow, sin, and misery, blasted hopes and unfulfilled desires, fear, loathing and anguish, of the ages since time’s beginning; eyes alight with all the soul-racking pain of eternally blazing infernos. ”

“ Driven on by the mad imaginings of a heart hovering between life and death, we fancy that the visible frame of things is replete with oracles. Or is it true; and do air and earth, divined by the sorrow-tutored spirit, possess true auguries? At such dread hour we are forced to listen and believe: nor can we ever afterwards, in common life, forget our miserable initiation into the mysteries of the unexplained laws of our nature. ”

“ Hitherto I had life and light, but now all is a dream, and I am in darkness, the darkness of death, the loneliness of the desert. I see life and movement and affection around me, but I am as marble. O God, defend me, for the spirit of evil has struck a terrible blow. I too, can die ”

“ Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: and I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood and fire, and vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory. ”

“ The feet that spring into the courts of heaven by a look or a word—by the glory of the starry night or the radiance of the dawn—stray down into the deepest abysses of hell, when Love has died or Nature forgets to smile. ”

“ Thou spot of gelid shade, after the hot-breathed desert,—
Thou silent waiting-hall, where Adam meeteth with his children,—
How full of dread, how full of hope, loometh inevitable Death:
Of dread, for all have sinned; of hope, for One hath saved;
The dread is drowned in joy, the hope is filled with immortality!
—Pass along, pilgrim of life, go to thy grave unfearing,
The terrors are but shadows now, that haunt the vale of Death.
{297} OF IMMORTALITY.
Gird up thy mind to contemplation, trembling inhabitant of earth ”

“ L_____ gone, without a word, without a line, my short dream all shattered and shimmering about me! and a cold, black, unfathomable abyss before me,--never shall I forget the first petrifying yet bewildering agony--the severing, as it were, of body and soul--that I felt, and which I am certain must be what one feels when the real severing of them by death comes. ”

“ The mad pulse beat back the baffled life with a low sob.
And so the stark and naked soul unfolded its wings to the dimness of Death!
A lonely, unknown Death.
A Death that left this dumb living body as his endless mark. ”

“ While, hung with clouds of fear and doubt, the unreturning wave Suddenly gives an awful plunge, like life into the grave; And many a hapless mortal there hath dived to vale or bliss; One—only one—hath ever lived to rise from that abyss! ”

“ For soon you lose the landscape through Absence, sorrow, eyes grown true To the naked limbs which show Buds that never more may blow. Now you know the lame were straight Ere you knew them, and the fate Of the old is yet to die. Now you know the dead who lie In the graves you saw where first The landscape on your vision burst, Were not always dead, and now Shadows rest upon the brow Of the souls as young as you. ”

“ Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, that is, though I am in peril of death, though in the midst of dangers, deep as a valley, dark as a shadow, and dreadful as death itself," or rather, "though I am under the arrests of death, have received the sentence of death within myself, and have all the reason in the world to look upon myself as a dying man, yet I am easy." ”

“ All night the soul would fight against these perils, struggling continually towards the dawn. Then, as the sun came up, the soul would escape from the evil demons, and wander free of danger through the heavens once more until darkness fell. ”

“ Now, not only are they closed in silence, but a horror seems to enwrap all creation. The sun, obscured by no earth-born cloud, gives out no spark nor ray of light; and in that solemn darkness every voice is strangely hushed. ”

“ This pure and godly element, silent and secretive, the avant-courrier of the Ultimate, of Things doomed, one day to be reclaimed by the once again triumphant elements when, from the dome of the universe, the last white great snow sheets shall fall, fall, fall—and this universe, once again locked in the ice-grip of the Snow God, shall drive forward mysteriously on its lonely way—lonely for it shall have been separated from Life, and the Spirit, Man, will have gone. ”

“ And bury the old gods where they lay
Sodden drunk with men's pain in the day,
In the dawn's first new burning white ray
That would shrivel like dead leaves the sacred lies,
The avengers, the graspers, the wringers of sighs,
Of blood from men's work-twisted hands, from their eyes
Of tears without hope ... But in the burning day
Of the dawn we would see them brooding to slay,
In a great wind whirled like dead leaves away.
In a hall on Olympus we held carouse,
In our talk as banners waving names,
Songs, phrases of the garlanded dead.
Yesterday I went back to that house ... ”

“ By night they are only heard, and their hoarse wailing voices, lost in the clouds, sound like the parting cry of souls in torment, striving to find the road to heaven, yet forced by an unconquerable fate to wander near the earth about the haunts of men ”

“ And though the thought of death, and the particular disaster that had befallen him fell upon his spirit sometimes with a shadow that plunged the whole world into desperate darkness, he could not deny that the shadow was gradually lifting, and the character of the agony that had desolated him was becoming less spontaneous, till, in the end, it became almost a calculable emotion that might be indulged or banished at will. ”

“ When by God thrown in the abyss.
Thus felt God at world's creation
When he realized, thereafter,
That he made the world . . . for sorrow.
Moonlight vanished . . . all is darkness
As within the prelate's bosom. ”

“ Now my mind is filled with sorrow,
Wanders though the bog and stubble,
Wanders weary through the brambles,
Roams throughout the dismal forest,
Till my life is filled with darkness,
And my spirit white with anguish. ”

“ I hear the rushing of the stars, I see strange worlds, my soul leaps through infinite spaces, the white light of immortality strikes upon my eyes and blinds me. Come, life unending, I have conquered death. ”

“ All low desires submerged and in an ecstasy that was not joy but perfect clarity he saw the misery and sorrow of the world, sounding its deeps of agony and loss, the ruin wrought by age, disease, and death,—the hopeless dark beyond. ”