--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.
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