is carried on through the senses and the memory. Much of the beauty, as well as of the vigour of the form, has long since departed. The eye has lost its brightness, the skin its bloom, the hair has fallen from the hoary head, the teeth are seen no more, the step is weak and trembling; and every thing tells that man goeth to his long home. There is much of peace in this spectacle of death, when death arrives merely in the latest and easiest form of gentle, gradual, natural decline. But it is still a solemn fulfilment of that great sentence, which, in so many forms, is executed upon the race of men; thinning the ranks of a generation, and enfeebling more and more the few who linger behind, till at length they lie down and sleep, as if weary with watching. PART THE SECOND. XXVIII. Essential Nature of Death. "Thou art the shadow of life; and as the tree Life eminent, creates the shade of death; The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall." TENNYSON. THE original doom was death; and it is death which, by all these various agencies, is sooner or later accomplished in every human creature. From the wide, general survey, as if from a mountain which overlooks all the vast family with their destinies, we now descend as into the valley of some individual lot, and consider what is that death itself, which was thus denounced and is thus executed. Many may be the solemn precursors, many the sad appendages, from which it may not be quite easy to ,separate, even in thought, the event which gives them their significance and importance. But nothing is strictly a part of death, if it could have existed without death, or is found at any time where life is continued. However intense the suffering, however probable the sign, it is not death if men have met it and survived. The arms and legs have all been amputated, and the heart and lungs have still played with vigour. Some parts of the body have been entirely mortified, and their removal has preserved the rest. The action of the brain, and with it life and sensibility, have existed for a little while, when, through injury to the spine, the whole body below the neck has been paralyzed. Even when the brain itself has been so fatally assailed that it could no more discharge its chief functions, and the intellect has thus been utterly deprived of its own organ, life may yet linger on, while the life of life is over. Death is something beyond all these changes. Suffering, in fact, belongs to life: all the pains of mortal distress are on this side of the boundary. There is an expression by which those who watch a sick-bed, without scientific knowledge, often distinguish the state of actual dying from all previous suffering, however fatal in its issue. They speak of the sufferer as at length struck with death;" meaning, that a certain change in his symptoms has occurred, which is never seen except when death is certainly at hand; that a point is passed which can never be repassed. He may still breathe, be conscious, speak and act, for hours; but a hand is upon him which cannot be mistaken, and will not be withdrawn. This popular mode of speech has its foundation. The actual dissolution of the bond between the body and the vital principle is begun, and is proceeding, and cannot be long delayed. It is not the same thing with any previous progress of decay in one organ, or in all. It is the lapse of the whole system from the state of organization into the state of dissolution. The beams may before have been weakened, or, one after another, removed; but now the building is falling to the ground. Such, as to the body, is death; the absolute cessation of all which makes matter the instrument and dwelling, not only of the spirit, which is in man; but also of the soul or animating power which is in brutes; and of the vital operation which is in vegetables; and even of the cohesion which is in minerals. A dead body ceases to have an existence of its own: the merest stone has more: every moment carries off some of its atoms, till all have joined the surrounding elements, so far as the process can be traced by human eye or science. The particles of the stone adhere to one another, till they are forcibly driven asunder, or are separated by chemical action; the particles of the human body, after death, fall asunder of themselves, or through the chemistry of nature. But the stone has no life; and there is life in the flower or shrub; life, from that great vital stream which pervades the universe; but a life simply passive. A similar life is that which carries on the involuntary operations of the human frame; and, in death, this life, too, is removed. Digestion, absorption, secretion, circulation, are, as it were, the vegetable parts of man; the power which gives them action returns at death into the general current of natural operations, from which it has been set apart in his person. The brute has still a higher life: he is conscious of the vital stream: he feels, acts, resists, consents, dimly remembers, almost reasons. His is the same life which, in man, performs these various operations, so that, in certain states, when they are performed in the least measure, as in infancy, in idiocy, or when the brain has been grievously injured, little more is seen in man than in the inferior animals. In death, the senses go out, even before the corporeal machinery comes to an utter pause; and this animal life, too, passes from our sight and from its habitation. That highest life of all; that which belongs, amongst all visible creatures, to man alone; that life of the spirit, which makes him capable of speech, and thus of distinct thought; which makes him a moral being, and therefore responsible to his Maker; that life returns not to the dust, nor to the current of vital powers which animates plants or brutes, for it came not from these sources. But it disappears like the rest; this moment it is here, perhaps as clear, as vigorous as ever; the next, we gaze on that which has neither power, nor sensibility, nor expression, and which is as far below the meanest living things as it was lately exalted above them. The dissolution of the body, the withdrawal of the vital soul, the departure of the immortal spirit; this is death. |