by Mark Twain
POST-MORTEM POETRY [1]
In Philadelphia they have a custom which it would be pleasant to see adopted throughout the land. It is that of appending to published death-notices a little verse or two of comforting poetry. Any one who is in the habit of reading the daily Philadelphia LEDGER must frequently be touched by these plaintive tributes to extinguished worth. In Philadelphia, the departure of a child is a circumstance which is not more surely followed by a burial than by the accustomed solacing poesy in the PUBLIC LEDGER. In that city death loses half its terror because the knowledge of its presence comes thus disguised in the sweet drapery of verse. For instance, in a late LEDGER I find the following (I change the surname):
DIED
Hawks.--On the 17th inst., Clara, the daughter of Ephraim and Laura Hawks, aged 21 months and 2 days.
That merry shout no more I hear,
No laughing child I see, No little arms are around my neck,
No feet upon my knee;
No kisses drop upon my cheek,
These lips are sealed to me. Dear Lord, how could I give Clara up
To any but to Thee?
A child thus mourned could not die wholly discontented. From the LEDGER of the same date I make the following extract, merely changing the surname, as before:
Becket.--On Sunday morning, 19th inst., John P., infant son of George and Julia Becket, aged 1 year, 6 months, and 15 days.
That merry shout no more I hear,
No laughing child I see, No little arms are around my neck,
No feet upon my knee;
No kisses drop upon my cheek,
These lips are sealed to me. Dear Lord, how could I give Johnnie up
To any but to Thee?
The similarity of the emotions as produced in the mourners in these two instances is remarkably evidenced by the singular similarity of thought which they experienced, and the surprising coincidence of language used by them to give it expression.
In the same journal, of the same date, I find the following (surname suppressed, as before):
Wagner.--On the 10th inst., Ferguson G., the son of William L. and Martha Theresa Wagner, aged 4 weeks and 1 day.
That merry shout no more I hear,
No laughing child I see, No little arms are around my neck,
No feet upon my knee;
No kisses drop upon my cheek,
These lips are sealed to me. Dear Lord, how could I give Ferguson up
To any but to Thee?
It is strange what power the reiteration of an essentially poetical thought has upon one's feelings. When we take up the LEDGER and read the poetry about little Clara, we feel an unaccountable depression of the spirits. When we drift further down the column and read the poetry about little Johnnie, the depression and spirits acquires and added emphasis, and we experience tangible suffering. When we saunter along down the column further still and read the poetry about little Ferguson, the word torture but vaguely suggests the anguish that rends us.
In the LEDGER (same copy referred to above) I find the following (I alter surname, as usual):
Welch.--On the 5th inst., Mary C. Welch, wife of William B. Welch, and daughter of Catharine and George W. Markland, in the 29th year of her age.
A mother dear, a mother kind,
Has gone and left us all behind.
Cease to weep, for tears are vain,
Mother dear is out of pain.
Farewell, husband, children dear,
Serve thy God with filial fear,
And meet me in the land above,
Where all is peace, and joy, and love.
What could be sweeter than that? No collection of salient facts (without reduction to tabular form) could be more succinctly stated than is done in the first stanza by the surviving relatives, and no more concise and comprehensive program of farewells, post-mortuary general orders, etc., could be framed in any form than is done in verse by deceased in the last stanza. These things insensibly make us wiser and tenderer, and better. Another extract:
Ball.--On the morning of the 15th inst., Mary E., daughter of John and Sarah F. Ball.
'Tis sweet to rest in lively hope
That when my change shall come Angels will hover round my bed,
To waft my spirit home.
The following is apparently the customary form for heads of families:
Burns.--On the 20th inst., Michael Burns, aged 40 years.
Dearest father, thou hast left us,
Hear thy loss we deeply feel; But 'tis God that has bereft us,
He can all our sorrows heal. Funeral at 2 o'clock sharp.
There is something very simple and pleasant about the following, which, in Philadelphia, seems to be the usual form for consumptives of long standing. (It deplores four distinct cases in the single copy of the LEDGER which lies on the Memoranda editorial table):
Bromley.--On the 29th inst., of consumption, Philip Bromley, in the 50th year of his age.
Affliction sore long time he bore,
Physicians were in vain-- Till God at last did hear him mourn,
And eased him of his pain.
That friend whom death from us has torn,
We did not think so soon to part; An anxious care now sinks the thorn
Still deeper in our bleeding heart.
This beautiful creation loses nothing by repetition. On the contrary, the oftener one sees it in the LEDGER, the more grand and awe-inspiring it seems.
With one more extract I will close:
Doble.--On the 4th inst., Samuel Pervil Worthington Doble, aged 4 days.
Our little Sammy's gone,
His tiny spirit's fled; Our little boy we loved so dear
Lies sleeping with the dead. A tear within a father's eye,
A mother's aching heart, Can only tell the agony
How hard it is to part.
Could anything be more plaintive than that, without requiring further concessions of grammar? Could anything be likely to do more toward reconciling deceased to circumstances, and making him willing to go? Perhaps not. The power of song can hardly be estimated. There is an element about some poetry which is able to make even physical suffering and death cheerful things to contemplate and consummations to be desired. This element is present in the mortuary poetry of Philadelphia degree of development.
The custom I have been treating of is one that should be adopted in all the cities of the land.
It is said that once a man of small consequence died, and the Rev. T. K. Beecher was asked to preach the funeral sermon-- a man who abhors the lauding of people, either dead or alive, except in dignified and simple language, and then only for merits which they actually possessed or possess, not merits which they merely ought to have possessed. The friends of the deceased got up a stately funeral. They must have had misgivings that the corpse might not be praised strongly enough, for they prepared some manuscript headings and notes in which nothing was left unsaid on that subject that a fervid imagination and an unabridged dictionary could compile, and these they handed to the minister as he entered the pulpit. They were merely intended as suggestions, and so the friends were filled with consternation when the minister stood in the pulpit and proceeded to read off the curious odds and ends in ghastly detail and in a loud voice! And their consternation solidified to petrification when he paused at the end, contemplated the multitude reflectively, and then said, impressively:
"The man would be a fool who tried to add anything to that. Let us pray!"
And with the same strict adhesion to truth it can be said that the man would be a fool who tried to add anything to the following transcendent obituary poem. There is something so innocent, so guileless, so complacent, so unearthly serene and self-satisfied about this peerless "hog-wash," that the man must be made of stone who can read it without a dulcet ecstasy creeping along his backbone and quivering in his marrow. There is no need to say that this poem is genuine and in earnest, for its proofs are written all over its face. An ingenious s
cribbler might imitate it after a fashion, but Shakespeare himself could not counterfeit it. It is noticeable that the country editor who published it did not know that it was a treasure and the most perfect thing of its kind that the storehouses and museums of literature could show. He did not dare to say no to the dread poet--for such a poet must have been something of an apparition--but he just shoveled it into his paper anywhere that came handy, and felt ashamed, and put that disgusted "Published by Request" over it, and hoped that his subscribers would overlook it or not feel an impulse to read it:
(Published by Request
LINES
Composed on the death of Samuel and Catharine Belknap's children
by M. A. Glaze
Friends and neighbors all draw near,
And listen to what I have to say; And never leave your children dear
When they are small, and go away.
But always think of that sad fate,
That happened in year of '63; Four children with a house did burn,
Think of their awful agony.
Their mother she had gone away,
And left them there alone to stay; The house took fire and down did burn;
Before their mother did return.
Their piteous cry the neighbors heard,
And then the cry of fire was given; But, ah! before they could them reach,
Their little spirits had flown to heaven.
Their father he to war had gone,
And on the battle-field was slain; But little did he think when he went away,
But what on earth they would meet again.
The neighbors often told his wife
Not to leave his children there, Unless she got some one to stay,
And of the little ones take care.
The oldest he was years not six,
And the youngest only eleven months old, But often she had left them there alone,
As, by the neighbors, I have been told.
How can she bear to see the place.
Where she so oft has left them there, Without a single one to look to them,
Or of the little ones to take good care.
Oh, can she look upon the spot,
Whereunder their little burnt bones lay, But what she thinks she hears them say,
''Twas God had pity, and took us on high.' And there may she kneel down and pray,
And ask God her to forgive; And she may lead a different life
While she on earth remains to live.
Her husband and her children too,
God has took from pain and woe. May she reform and mend her ways,
That she may also to them go.
And when it is God's holy will,
O, may she be prepared To meet her God and friends in peace,
And leave this world of care.
Written in 1870.
THE DANGER OF LYING IN BED
The man in the ticket-office said:
"Have an accident insurance ticket, also?"
"No," I said, after studying the matter over a little. "No, I believe not; I am going to be traveling by rail all day today. However, tomorrow I don't travel. Give me one for tomorrow."
The man looked puzzled. He said:
"But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel by rail--"
"If I am going to travel by rail I sha'n't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing _I_ am afraid of."
I had been looking into this matter. Last year I traveled twenty thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveled over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail; and the year before that I traveled in the neighborhood of ten thousand miles, exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have traveled sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned. AND NEVER AN ACCIDENT.
For a good while I said to myself every morning: "Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd, and buy an accident ticket." And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, "A man CAN'T buy thirty blanks in one bundle."
But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the the lot. I could read of railway accidents every day--the newspaper atmosphere was foggy with them; but somehow they never came my way. I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it. My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. I stopped buying accident tickets and went to ciphering. The result was astounding. THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.
I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters, less than THREE HUNDRED people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six-- or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country; so the double number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise.
By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day--16 altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six months--the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from 13 to 23 persons of ITS million in six months; and in the same time 13,000 of New York's million die in their beds! My flesh crept, my hair stood on end. "This is appalling!" I said. "The danger isn't in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again."
I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of the Erie road. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day. There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much; a great many such roads. There are many roads scattered about the Union that do a prodigious passenger business. Therefore it was fair to presume that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct. There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000. So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays. They do that, too--there is no question about it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least. They must use some of the same people over again, likely.
San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60 deaths a week in the former and 500 a week in the latter--if they have luck. That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York--say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die every year. That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die annually. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting
in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!
You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.
And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.
[One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch.]
The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is, NOT that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth, but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred!
PORTRAIT OF KING WILLIAM III
I never can look at those periodical portraits in THE GALAXY magazine without feeling a wild, tempestuous ambition to be an artist. I have seen thousands and thousands of pictures in my time-- acres of them here and leagues of them in the galleries of Europe-- but never any that moved me as these portraits do.
There is a portrait of Monsignore Capel in the November number, now COULD anything be sweeter than that? And there was Bismarck's, in the October number; who can look at that without being purer and stronger and nobler for it? And Thurlow and Weed's picture in the September number; I would not have died without seeing that, no, not for anything this world can give. But looks back still further and recall my own likeness as printed in the August number; if I had been in my grave a thousand years when that appeared, I would have got up and visited the artist.
I sleep with all these portraits under my pillow every night, so that I can go on studying them as soon as the day dawns in the morning. I know them all as thoroughly as if I had made them myself; I know every line and mark about them. Sometimes when company are present I shuffle the portraits all up together, and then pick them out one by one and call their names, without referring to the printing on the bottom. I seldom make a mistake--never, when I am calm.
