No gentle processions to churchyards among
the fields, the bronze crests bossed deep on the memorial tablets, and
the skylark singing above them from among the corn. But the life
trampled out in the slime of the street, crushed to dust amidst the
roaring of the wheel, tossed countlessly away into howling winter wind
along five hundred leagues of rock-fanged shore. Or, worst of all,
rotted down to forgotten graves through years of ignorant patience, and
vain seeking for help from man, for hope in God--infirm, imperfect
yearning, as of motherless infants starving at the dawn; oppressed
royalties of captive thought, vague ague-fits of bleak, amazed despair.
A goodly landscape this, for the lad to paint, and under a goodly
light. Wide enough the light was, and clear; no more Salvator's lurid
chasm on jagged horizon, nor Duerer's spotted rest of sunny gleam on
hedgerow and field; but light over all the world. Full shone now its
awful globe, one pallid charnel-house,--a ball strewn bright with human
ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding-white with
death from pole to pole,--death, not of myriads of poor bodies only,
but of will, and mercy, and conscience; death, not once inflicted on
the flesh, but daily, fastening on the spirit; death, not silent or
patient, waiting his appointed hour, but voiceful, venomous; death with
the taunting word, and burning grasp, and infixed sting.
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