For none may tell what beauty, What endless good there lies, In some little nameless duty, Whose remembrance never dies.
Leave thou some light behind thee, Some token of thy way; Let not a false ease bind thee— Thou art not wholly clay.
There is something noble in thee, Let it speak and not be mute; There is something that should win thee From a kindred with the brute.
Thou art not, oh! my brother, Wholly impotent for good; Thou may’st win or warn another From the wrongs thou hast withstood.
Leave thou some trace behind thee— In life’s warfare, go, engage; Let no more a false fate bind thee— Write thou upon life’s page.
I came upon these simple flowers As something I revere; They grew in Love’s enchanted bowers— And love hath placed them here.
I kiss their cheeks of virgin bloom, I press their dewy lips, While my wrapt soul of their perfume, Inebriated sips.
I look into their violet eyes, And feel my heart grow calm, And fancy I’m in Paradise, Inhaling Eden’s balm.
There in ecstatic dreams I rove Among celestial bowers, Weaving a garland for my Love, Of beatific flowers.
BY SAMUEL HENRY DICKSON, M. D.; PROFESSOR IN THE MEDICAL COLLEGE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.
As the word Life is employed in a double sense to denote the actions or phenomena by which it is developed, and the cause of these phenomena, so the old English word Death is used familiarly to express two or more meanings. The first of these is the transition from the living to the lifeless or inanimate state—the act, that is, of dying; the second, the condition of an organized body which has ceased to live, while organization yet remains, and symmetry still displays itself, and the admirable structure of its parts is not yet destroyed by decomposition, or resolved into the original and primary elements from which it was moulded,
“Before Decay’s effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers.”
We occasionally speak of “dead matter” in the sense of inorganic; but this is merely a rhetorical or metaphorical phrase. That which has never lived cannot properly be said to be dead.
In the following essay, I shall use the word chiefly in the first of the senses above indicated. It will often be convenient to employ it in the second also; but in doing so, I will be careful so to designate its bearing as to avoid any confusion. The context will always prevent any misunderstanding on this point.