man yesterday, and to-day knowing more of heaven or hell than all the philosophers upon earth. Now only serving as a subject for dissection, while inheriting an immortality! Well, he is at all events dead, yet when did he die?—is the last act of expiration the death? Certainly not. A smouldering vitality exists in the great nervous centres for some time afterwards, and persons apparently dead have been restored to life by galvanism and artificial respiration when the pulse and the breathing had long ceased. This brought suddenly to my mind stories I had heard of people hastily conveyed to anatomical theatres who were rescued from supposed death by the stimulus of the surgeon’s knife.
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(See p. 295.)
The idea grew horribly vivid until I fancied that I saw the shrouding-sheet, that enveloped the body, slightly move. Though I felt that this was but the effect of an excited imagination, to reassure my mind I rose, walked to the table, removed the covering, and looked steadily upon the face of the dead. There was nothing to alarm in the wan effigy. The characters of mortality were there engraven in lines not to be mistaken, and I gazed upon the fixed and peaceful outline of what had been a vigorous, half-savage, toiling athlete, with a strange and deep interest. Young as I was, my eyes had often before rested upon the sublime and touching spectacle of death; but I never remember to have been impressed more deeply. In life, the rough, reckless, uneducated rock-blaster, his facial developments indicative alone of mere animal existence. In death, how great the contrast—how solemn; how elevated the lines; how beautiful the repose:—
More fair than life is thy pale image, Death.
The face-convulsing passions of the mind,
They pass away upon the ebbing breath,
And leave nor earthly Pain nor Tear behind
To break the shadow of thy deep repose.
Angelic lines, unmoving, firm, and pure,
In solemn curves Death’s majesty compose,
Sharp cut, as if for ages to endure.
’Tis very strange, that the immortal soul,
So darkly housed behind life’s prison-bars,
In haste to ’scape mortality’s control,
And join the kindred light beyond the stars,
Thus roughly shakes the tenement of life,
Yet leaves no impress of the passing strife!
