But rave and cry as I may, she is dead.
In smiling and sweetly speaking, even while yet I
said “She is here!” yea, in that very moment
she went.
Our Barbara is asleep!—to awake—when?—where?—we
know not, only we altogether hope, that, when next
she opens her blue eyes, it will be in the sunshine
of God’s august smile—God, through
life and in death, her friend.
“Then, breaking into tears, ‘Dear
God,’ she cried, ’and must we see,
All blissful things depart from us, or
e’er we go to Thee;
We cannot guess Thee in the wood, or hear
Thee in the wind:
Our cedars must fall round us e’er
we see the light behind.
Ay, sooth, we feel too strong in weal
to need Thee on that road;
But, woe being come, the soul is dumb
that crieth not on God.’”
I am twenty years old now, barely twenty; and seventy
is the appointed boundary of man’s date, often
exceeded by ten, by fifteen years. During all
these fifty—perhaps sixty—years,
I shall have to do without Barbara. I have not
yet arrived at the pain of this thought:
that will come, quick enough, I suppose, by-and-by!—it
is the astonishment of it that is making my
mind reel and stagger!
I suppose there are few that have not endured and
overlived the frightful novelty of this idea.
I am sitting in a stupid silence; my stiff eyes—dry
now, but dim and sunk with hours of frantic weeping—fixed
on vacancy, while I try to think exactly of
her face, with a greedy, jealous fear lest, in the
long apathy of the endless years ahead of me, one soft
line, one lovely line, may become faint and hazy to
me.
How often I have sat for hours in the same room with
her, without one glance at her! It seems to me,
now, monstrous, incredible, that I should ever
have moved my eyes from her—that I should
ever have ceased kissing her, and telling her how
altogether beloved she was by me.
If all of us, while we are alive, could stealthily,
once a year, and during a moment long enough to exchange
but two words with them, behold those loved ones whom
we have lost, death would be no more death.
But, O friends, that one moment, for whose sake we
could so joyfully live through all the other minutes
of the year, to us never comes.
I suppose trouble has made me a little light-headed.
I think to-day I am foolisher than usual. Thoughts
that would not tease other people, tease me.
If I ever see her again—if God ever give
me that great felicity—I do not quite know
why He should, but if—if—(ah!
what an if it is!)—my mind misgives me—I
have my doubts that it will not be quite Barbara—
not the Barbara that knitted socks for the boys, and
taught Tou Tou, and whose slight, fond arms I can—now
that I have shut my eyes—so plainly feel
thrown round my shoulders, to console me when I have
broken into easy tears at some silly tiff with the
others. Can even the omnipotent God remember
all the unnumbered dead, and restore to them the shape
and features that they once wore, and by which they
who loved them knew them?
