THANATOS ATHANATOS.

A MEDLEY.

XVII.

A DIGRESSION ON DEATH AND SUMMER-TIME:-" ELIA" IN AN AUGUST NOOND. M. MOIR ON A CHILD'S BURIAL IN SPRING-ERNEST MALTRAVERS AND THE WINTER'S NIGHT-PISISTRATUS CAXTON AND THE APRIL EVENING-JANE EYRE AT SUNSET IN THE GARDEN-WORDSWORTH CROSSING THE SANDS OF LEVENEXTRACTS FROM THOMAS HOOD, ARTHUR HELPS, LEIGH HUNT, JEAN PAUL RICHTER, ROUSSEAU-A BIT OF STATISTICS FROM BUCKLE'S CIVILIZATION— THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SUBJECT EXPLAINED IN DE QUINCEY'S " CONFESSIONS" AND HIS "AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES."

And overcome us like a summer cloud.

Macbeth.

The lightest thoughts have their roots in gravity, and the most fugitive colours of the world are set off by the mighty background of eternity. One of the greatest pleasures of so light and airy a thing as the vernal season arises from the consciousness that the world is young again; that the spring is come round, that we shall not all cease, and be no world. Nature has begun again, and not begun for nothing. One fancies somehow that she could not have the heart to put a stop to us in April or May. LEIGH HUNT: The Seer.

A vision like incarnate April, warning,
With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy
Into his summer grave.

SHELLEY: Epipsychidion.

Chiefly it is when sunshine floods the sky,
O'er waving corn-fields, that I think on death.

HOFFMANN.

At this time the declining sun flamed goldenly in the west. It was a glorious hour. The air fell upon the heart like balm; the sky, gold and vermilionchecked, hung, a celestial tent, above mortal man. . . . "Did ever God walk the earth in finer weather?" said the Hermit. . . . "Evenings such as this," continued the Hermit, after a pause, "seem to me the very holiday time of death," &c. Chronicles of Clovernook.

What kinship hath mid Summer with the grave?

-Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed
And her together.

The Recluse.

C. LAMB: Hester.

By common consent the image of death is connected with what is chill, winterly, desolate. How is it, then, that we so often associate it with glorious spring-tide, and the pomp of summer suns?

But do we so associate it? perhaps the reader will ask. Are you not taking for granted what it would be less convenient to prove?

Unquestionably it appears more natural, at first sight, and is infinitely more common, to think of death in connexion with winter and its bleak wretchedness, than with mid summer, and its garniture of green and gold. Frost at midnight, while the pitiless blast is raging, seems as

"In

nearly allied to stone-cold death, as July splendours do not. winter," says Charles Lamb, in an essay he never surpassed—“ in winter this intolerable disinclination to dying-to give it its mildest namedoes more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death." Similar was the feeling expressed by Delta (Moir), when witnessing a child's burial in Spring:

Under the shroud of the solemn cloud, when the hills are capp'd with snow, When the moaning breeze, thro' leafless trees, bears tempest on its wing; In the Winter's wrath we think of death, but not when lilies blow, And, Lazarus-like, from March's tomb walks forth triumphant Spring.

Thus, too, when his betrothed is dying, on a bitter winter's night, Ernest Maltravers is described as throwing open his window, stepping into the balcony, and baring his breast to the keen air: "the icy heavens looked down upon the hoar-rime that gathered over the grass, and the ghostly boughs of the death-like trees. All things in the world. without, brought the thought of the grave, and the pause of being, and the withering up of beauty, closer and closer to his soul. In the palpable and griping winter, death itself seemed to wind round him its skeleton and joyless arms."

Hence it is in accordance with the common feeling, that a story of death, or a thought of the grave, is, in Shelley's phrase,

-more fit for the weird winter nights,

Than for those garish summer days, when we
Scarcely believe much more than we can see.

Make of it, if you will, a Winter's Tale; but forbear weaving it into a
Midsummer Night's Dream.

Nevertheless, if we look a little deeper into the matter, we do find a connexion of subtle power between summer glories and that chill presence, the shadow of death. "Is it regret for buried time," asks the laureate, "that keenlier in sweet April wakes?" The question is suggestive in its bearing on that now before us. And here let us refer to another passage by the author of "Ernest Maltravers," in a later work, and every way a riper, better, healthier one. The young cousins in "The Caxtons" sit down together in the churchyard, one calm evening in spring, while the roseate streaks are fading gradually from the dark grey of long, narrow, fantastic clouds. Blanche has gently objected, how cold and still it is among the graves; but "Sisty" answers, not colder than on the village green. His record of that sweet silent session then merges in meditation: "There is a certain melancholy in the evenings of early spring, which is among those influences of Nature the most universally recognised, the most difficult to explain. . . . Examine not, O child of man!-examine not that mysterious melancholy with the hard eyes of thy reason; thou canst not impale it on the spikes of thy thorny logic, nor describe its enchanted circle by problems conned from thy schools. Borderer thyself of two worlds-the Dead and the Living

66 one even

give thine ear to the tones, bow thy soul to the shadows, that steal, in the Season of Change, from the dim Border Land." It was ing in the beginning of June," that Jane Eyre, an orphan school-girl at Lowood, lingered alone in the garden, and kept lingering a little longer still, for "it was such a pleasant evening, so serene, so warm; the still glowing west promised so fairly another fine day on the morrow;" and then and there it was, that, "noting these things, and enjoying them as a child might," it entered her head "as it had never done before,-'How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying!" The then and there have a psychological significance, as most things in "Jane Eyre" have.

But leaving spring-tide freshness and summer twilight, and advancing to the full blaze of sunshine, when the days of the year are at their longest and brightest, how stands the question of relationship with death and decay? Wordsworth describes the journey he one day took, in youth's delightful prime, "over the smooth sands of Leven's ample estuary," and "beneath a genial sun,"

With distant prospect among gleams of sky
And clouds and intermingling mountain tops,
In one inseparable glory clad,

Creatures of one ethereal substance met
In consistory, like a diadem.

Or crown of burning seraphs as they sit
In the empyrean. Underneath that pomp
Celestial, lay unseen the pastoral vales
Among whose happy fields I had grown up
From childhood. On the fulgent spectacle,
That neither passed away nor changed, I gazed
Enrapt; but brightest things are wont to draw
Sad opposites out of the inner heart,

As even their pensive influence drew from mine.

Herein lies the solution of the seeming paradox-in this suggestion of opposites. "The brightest sunshine," says Hood, in "Tylney Hall"an unequal but underrated work-" throws the darkest shadow, and the horrible spectre of Death could never frown so sternly and blackly as when thus introduced into the full blaze of the golden glorious light of love." Or as he puts it in his "Ode to Melancholy,"—

The sunniest things throw sternest shade,

And there is ev'n a happiness

That makes the heart afraid.

The essay-writer in "Friends in Council," Milverton, in his account of a bright day's gay experiences in the Spanish capital, has this memento: "And I looked up at the splendid palace of Madrid, and thought of regal pomps and vanities. And then, how it was I know not, I thought of death. Perhaps anything very beautiful has that thought in the background." The "perhaps" is no reckless conjecture, beyond or beside the mark. Leigh Hunt points to the same philosophy when discussing the theme, why sweet music produces sadness-why in the midst of even the most light and joyous music, our eyes shall sometimes fill with tears. How is this? The reason surely is, that we have an

instinctive sense of the fugitive and perishing nature of all sweet things, -of beauty, of youth, of life,—of all those fair shows of the world, of which music seems to be the voice, and of whose transitory nature it reminds us most when it is most beautiful, because it is then that we most regret our mortality.-Writing (July, 1795) to his Jewish friend, Emanuel, after a visit to Baireuth, Jean Paul Richter says: "The day that I left Baireuth, the longest day of the year, was my shortest and happiest. . . . It is wonderful that men, in seasons of happiness, in youth, in beautiful places, in the fairest season of the year, incline more surely to the enthusiasm of longing; they think oftener of a future world, and more readily form pictures of death; while the opposite takes place in want, in age, in Greenland, and in winter." Rousseau felt something of this when he wrote, in his Confessions,-what he (of course) thought "une chose bien singulière," that his imagination was most cheerful amid adverse environments, while "au contraire elle est moins riante lorsque tout rit autour de moi..... Si je veux peindre le printemps, il faut que je sois en hiver," and so on, vice versâ, by the same rule of con

traries.

It is in the Confessions of another, and very different writer, that the question of association between summer splendours and the shadow of death, is more fully and impressively expounded than by any other philosopher. Before referring, however, to this forcible exposition, by one who combines the prose-poet with the philosopher, let us interpose an illustration of a thoroughly prosaic and matter-of-fact kind—a statistical conclusion-showing that bright summer days have no necessary opposition to, nor dreary winter any necessary concord with, man's tendency to brood on his mortality, or shape his thoughts, or fears, or wishes, thitherward. Alluding to the once accepted belief in France-not yet exploded, perhaps that we English, the victims of natural melancholy, are constantly committing suicide, "particularly in November," when we hang and shoot ourselves by thousands, Mr. Buckle states-as the result of his researches in Quetelet, and Tissot, and Forbes Winslow, and Hawkins, and the Journal of the Statistical Society-that unfortunately for such foreign assumptions, the fact is exactly opposite to what is generally supposed; for whereas the notion that there are more suicides in gloomy weather than in fine weather used always to be taken for granted, and was a favourite topic with the French wits, who were never weary of expatiating on our love of self-murder, and on the relation between it and our murky climate, we have, on the contrary, decisive evidence that there are more suicides in summer than in winter.

The remarkable paragraph in the "Confessions of an English Opiumeater," to which we have referred, is the following: "I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my life, that the deaths of those whom we love, and, indeed, the contemplation of death generally, is (cæteris paribus) more affecting in summer than in any other season of the year. And the reasons are these three, I think: first, that the visible heavens in summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) more infinite; the clouds by which chiefly the eye expounds the distance of the blue pavilion stretched over our heads are in summer more voluminous, more massed, and are accumulated in far

grander and more towering piles; secondly, the light and the appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted to be types and characters of the infinite; and thirdly (which is the main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not actually more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly, in that season."

In that unrivalled chapter, "The Affliction of Childhood," with which the same writer's "Autobiographic Sketches" open, he recurs to his explanation-thirty years before-in the "Opium Confessions," of the reason why death, other conditions remaining the same, is more profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year-so far, at least, as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents of scenery or season; the reason lying, as we have seen, in the antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer, and the frozen sterilities of the grave. In a digression of surpassing pathos and solemn beauty, Mr. de Quincey then shows how inextricably, in early childhood, his own feelings and images of death were entangled with those of summer, as connected with Palestine and Jerusalem, about which he read with his three sisters in the nursery, from a pictured Bible, and learned to associate the cloudless sunlights of Syria, and the pomps of Palm Sunday, with the passion and death of the Lord of life. And thence he returns to describe his visit to the room in which his dead sister lay. That description furnished valuable aid for the first section of THANATOS ATHANATOS. And another fragmentary portion of it will serviceably illustrate the present. Let the reader read and assent: "Turning round, I sought my sister's face. But the bed had been moved, and the back was now turned towards myself. Nothing met my eyes but one large window, wide open, through which the sun of midsummer at mid-day was showering down torrents of splendour. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the expressed types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold, or for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of life and the glory of life. ...

....

"From the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face. . . . . I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow-the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell: it is in this world the one great audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances—namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day.