Early Graves: A Book for the Bereaved

Have often purposed, as I have been often asked, to publish such a book as this. The purpose and the request, long entertained, I resolved recently to carry out, upon one of those occasions in which the words of the title possessed a sad and exceptional significance. Ifc was in connection with a bereft household in which the writer, as former pastor and friend, had a sacred interest, and where the touching monotone claimed a still more mournful appropriateness than in the case of the stricken Patriarch who first uttered it: — “Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin alsol” (Gen. xliL 36).

Through dark and death, through fire and frosty With empty arms and treasure lost,

I knock and cry, Undone! Undone I
Is there no help, no comfort — none?
No gleaning in the wide wheat- plains
“Where others drive their loaded wains?” 1

“Oh, eyes that for my children’s sake.
Have poured forth tears like summer rain I
Oh, breaking heart, that will not break,
Yet never can be whole again I”

* E. Barrett Browning.

Ko mission or employment can be more sacred than the endeavour to speak balm- words of comfort to those overtaken and prostrated with similar bereavements; yes, and for whom it may well be added, there exist pre-eminent solaces and consolations. Touching in their very tenderness, and slow to heal as such wounds are, the smitten heart, if unable to subscribe to the saying of Lord Bacon, “Believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc dimittis” can understand the truth of another observation in the case especially of dear departed children,” The lamentation for an innocent child is a {hornless sorrow No unmeaning words, surely, in the lips of one who could thus pour forth the pathetic dirges of his grief: —

‘’ Despair was in our last farewell,

As closed thine eye;
Tears of our anguish may not tell

When thou didst die f
Words may not paint our grief for thee;
Sighs are but bubbles on the sea
Of our unfathomed agony.”

I cannot do better, in extending these preliminary remarks, than bring together some additional “cardipJionia” in the shape of strains wafted from harps that have been hung on the willows above * early tombstones; ’ but which have been taken down to sing the Lord’s song — “Songs in the night.” These

Quoted in Mr. Logan’s “Words of Comfort,’* p. 398, in a letter from D. M. Moir (‘* Delta “).

minstrels of sorrow may be left to tell, first, the nature and characteristics of the afflictions that are more exclusively to engage our thoughts in the pages which follow, and then their exceptional solaces. If we begin with the shadow, it is only to give strength and brightness to the sunshine.

The First characteristic which impresses us in connection with early bereavement is its universality. Few are the British households indeed, home or colonial, in busy city or quiet village or lone mountain glen, to which the word “an early grave” does not bring a rush of one or more sacred memories, with the sense of an irreparable loss. Nothing can better express the feeling than the familiar stanzas of Longfellow, with their chords of simple, but, to use his own words in another connection, “exquisite music,” for they touch the deepest sensibilities of our common nature: —

‘* There is no flock, however watched and tended,
But one dead Iamb is there;
There is no fireside, howsoe’er defended.
But has one vacant chair!

The air is full of farewells to the dying

And mournings for the dead; The heart of Rachel, for her children crying,

Will not be comforted”

I pass on to a Second characteristic, although one shared in common with all bereavements. There is perhaps no sadder element, no sadder thought and reflection, than alas! the too obvious one — so obvious it seems a platitude to state it or enlarge upon it — that the fondly familiar face and voice and footstep will never again be heard and recognised. “He shall not return to me!” wails out the monarch of Israel over his withered flower.

Their voice, their toach, their sniile.
Those love-springs flowing o*er.
Earth for its little while
Shall never know them more.’*

*’ To know that prayers and time and pains.
Can the lost love no more regain;
Than bid the hours of dying day
Gleam in their midnight noon again.’

Every anniversary, formerly associated with life and joy, now seems to toll anew the funeral-bell, and to summon the mourner to visit with fresh tears the sepulchre of buried hopes. We stand in the dark empty halls of grief where life’s newly-lighted tapers have already burnt to their socket, and the poet’s cry rings in vain along the deserted corridors: —

“Oh for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!”

The same thought is thus touchingly expanded and vivified: —

“She will not view those upland fields snow-shrouded, Nor mark the fair frost-tracery on the pane;

1 Rev. E. n. Bickemteth.

Nor watch the sky by winter gloom o’erclouded, Nor see the Christmas stars shine out again.

She will not listen to the church-bells ringing From the old tower their Christmas greeting sweet;

Nor hear the clear child-voices blithely singing Their ancient carols through the village street.’*

To the same effect we may listen to the tearful lines of another, over a missing “angel-child “: —

“Twas as if some little song-bird

Had dropped down from yon blue dome,

Warbling still among the others,
Wandering with them where they roam,

And yet hallowing remembrance
With low gushes about home I

Shall we never hear her knocking

At the little ivied door T
Will she never run to kiss us,

Bounding o*er the oaken floor?
Has that music gone for ever?

Are those tender lispings o’er?
Oh, the terror I Oh, the anguish,

Of that one word — Evermore 1 *’

Yet at times — and in this also poetry only too truly interprets the experience of mourners — there would seem to come to them something like a strange reawaking from the wild disquieting dream. In their unavailing -musings they are led to ask. Can it indeed be, after all, a sadj stern, irrevocable, irreversible reality? May it not prove but a fitful illusion and fantasy, which the morrow will dispel?

Sarah Doudney. * J. S. Bigg.

“The dark clouds part and the heavens are blue, And the trembling stare are shining through:

But the vision faded, and all was still
On the purple valley and distant hill;
No sound was there save the wailing breeze,
The rain, and the rustling cypress trees!”

Tli’is last quotation yet further suggests, what most have vividly felt in their hour of bereavement and in their heart of hearts, — never so much as when the early hopes of childhood or youth-promise have perished from their view, — how, by reason of that one irreparable stroke, all around them is changed? Even beautiful Nature, that once delighted eye and soul, seems to have undergone a blight. Its brightest rainbow-hues have become pale and ashen; — in accordance with a true touch in the true poetry of grief I heard, long ago, from the lips of an aged cottager suddenly bereft of her only stay, as she described the sky no longer blue, the grass no longer green, the sun no longer gold. It was the same thought which, about the same time, had been translated for her by more than one poet. Let us hear the Poet-Laureate from his matchless dirge over departed worth: —

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