CHAPTER XXV.LAST WORDS.
Come, lovely and soothing death,Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,In the day, in the night, to all, to each,Sooner or later, delicate death.Prais’d be the fathomless universe,For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!For the sure enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.—Walt Whitman.
Gabriel Norris uttered the few reverent words that consigned the dust of Cartice Doring to the purifying flames. This was his conclusion:
“‘No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.’ We all understand that better, when in the presence of the voiceless dead, than at any other time. Then it is that we feel our oneness most; then do we come into more solemn touch with the great heart of all; then, even when our hearts are breaking, we better understand the infinite love that manifests in every event of our lives, even the last mysterious one which takes us out of the sight of our fellow-men.
“Then it is that the problem of life confronts us with importunate appeal, and demands from our bleeding hearts an answer.
“She whose still white form lies here, lived,aspired, suffered, joyed a little perhaps, and learned a part of the great lesson whose book has no end, worked side by side with us, and then passed out of our sight, leaving only this perishable temple to return to its elements.
“Has she but passed through a door to array herself in new garments on the other side, in a larger chamber, or has the unit of her individuality melted back into the Universal ocean, as a drop of water falls again into the sea from which it has been dipped?
“Does the heart that has groaned in anguish and throbbed with love find the end of everything in dreamless oblivion? Or does it still throb on somewhere out of our sight, but not out of the care of the divine love that thought it into being?
“For her this great question was answered long before the illusion we call death transferred her to a larger chamber. Sheknewthat she should never die; that, as a unit, an individual, a soul, she was indestructible, the heir of all the ages through all the ages.
“Communion of spirit? Do you sneer at it as an unsatisfactory, even if a possible thing? What else have we here? We are spirit now as much as we shall ever be, and all our communion with each other is spiritual, for every act of our lives has a spiritual quality, and is but the expression of spirit.
“The things we see are but fractions of that which we see not. We never saw the soul to whose visible form we bid farewell for a time to-day. We saw but its mask, its clay image. That which made its impress upon us was the spirit. By means of what it said and did, by the flash of kindness in the eye, by the pressure of the hand in sympathy, by all the means great and small by which it expressed its good will and love to others, it revealed itself. These are what we shall remember and cherish.
“Life is not all ‘a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.’ It is an endless becoming.
“Let us work by every means in our power to educate the individual, to develop the unit, the imperishable, never-dying unit, for this is the secret of all improvement, all growth, all happiness. Only by growth out of ignorance into knowledge can we come into our inheritance of eternal good.
“Nothing is great in this world and nothing is small. I cannot say of the soul whose transition we celebrate to-day that it was either, for there is no distinction. It aspired, and that means much. It strove to go up higher; and that striving will lift it into the fulness of light.
“That living, loving, truthful, beautiful spirit, has not gone back to the sea of universal Being to lose its identity. There is no going back. In that sea we live and move and have our beingnow, as well as in the future, yet we remain individuals. The union with the one mind toward which we are all moving is an harmonious ever-upward-tending life, not an extinction of the individual. The school, the club, the state are its prototypes here,—a blending of the many units in one body, but the extinction of none.
“We sorrow, but not without hope. Our friend still lives. We shall find her again.”
“I loved her,” said Gabriel Norris, as he sat with Lilla in the little flat after all was over. “To be near her I came to New York. She never knew; but now she knows. My love did not crave possession. I was happy in loving. I am still happy in it. She lives and I love her. It is enough.”
THE END.