In my rambles one evening I found a bunch of skeleton
leaves, whose beauty attracted my admiring gaze. Each leaf was perfect
in form and fibre, yet utterly devoid of sap; lifeless in its delicate,
transparent loveliness, and soon to crumble into dust. The more minutely
I looked at them, the more beauties did I see unfolding to my pensive
gaze. "Beautiful are ye in death!" mused I to myself; "ay, more lovely
than in your vernal spring-tide."
So have we seen the fragile leaves of humanity more
beautiful in death than in the flush of life. And who has not joyed to
contemplate that still, calm loveliness—to read in the voiceless,
soul-touching eloquence of a last smile an intimation of another and
more glorious transformation, an awakening to a sinless, sorrowless, and
everlasting existence, whose truth and beauty shall so fill the soul in
its marvellous expansion, as to cast into shade all the fairest
reminiscences of time and sense? ''The former things shall not be
remembered, nor come into mind." Death shall then be swallowed up in
victory, and the most beautiful forms of the life that now is in the
perfect manifestations of the life that is to come, and in the glory
that excelleth all that mortal eyes have ever beheld, or mortal hearts
conceived. Oh, to have part in that second resurrection!
