Death and Mourning

LORD ILLINGWORTH : The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.

A powerful searchlight of the human mind, piercing by its rays the darkness of the unknown, has suddenly been extinguished. The world has lost its foremost genius and the Jewish people its most illustrious son in the present generation.

I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.

I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.

Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.

So wise so young, they say, do never live long. 4

I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan, Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death.

And my large kingdom for a little grave, A little little grave, an obscure grave.

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth; Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough, That sometime grew within this learned man.

When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers; Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times.

Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone, Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night, And would have told him half his Troy was burn’d.

For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand an end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

We have done but greenly, In hugger-mugger to inter him.

A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time And razure of oblivion.

If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in my arms.

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf.

Be absolute for death.

Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity.

And it is great To do that thing that ends all other deeds, Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change.

Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing Can touch him further.

O! wither’d is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fall’n; young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.