A bright, a glorious smile passed over her face, and
she said, brokenly,—“O! love,—joy,—peace!”
gave one sigh and passed from death unto life!
“Farewell, beloved child! the bright, eternal
doors have closed after thee; we shall see thy sweet
face no more. O, woe for them who watched thy
entrance into heaven, when they shall wake and find
only the cold gray sky of daily life, and thou gone
forever!”
“This Is the Last of Earth"*
* “This is the
last of Earth! I am content,” last words
of
John Quincy Adams, uttered
February 21, 1848.
The statuettes and pictures in Eva’s room were
shrouded in white napkins, and only hushed breathings
and muffled footfalls were heard there, and the light
stole in solemnly through windows partially darkened
by closed blinds.
The bed was draped in white; and there, beneath the
drooping angel-figure, lay a little sleeping form,—sleeping
never to waken!
There she lay, robed in one of the simple white dresses
she had been wont to wear when living; the rose-colored
light through the curtains cast over the icy coldness
of death a warm glow. The heavy eyelashes drooped
softly on the pure cheek; the head was turned a little
to one side, as if in natural steep, but there was
diffused over every lineament of the face that high
celestial expression, that mingling of rapture and
repose, which showed it was no earthly or temporary
sleep, but the long, sacred rest which “He giveth
to his beloved.”
There is no death to such as thou, dear Eva! neither
darkness nor shadow of death; only such a bright fading
as when the morning star fades in the golden dawn.
Thine is the victory without the battle,—the
crown without the conflict.
So did St. Clare think, as, with folded arms, he stood
there gazing. Ah! who shall say what he did think?
for, from the hour that voices had said, in the dying
chamber, “she is gone,” it had been all
a dreary mist, a heavy “dimness of anguish.”
He had heard voices around him; he had had questions
asked, and answered them; they had asked him when
he would have the funeral, and where they should lay
her; and he had answered, impatiently, that he cared
not.
Adolph and Rosa had arranged the chamber; volatile,
fickle and childish, as they generally were, they
were soft-hearted and full of feeling; and, while
Miss Ophelia presided over the general details of order
and neatness, it was their hands that added those
soft, poetic touches to the arrangements, that took
from the death-room the grim and ghastly air which
too often marks a New England funeral.
