for “now Christ is risen from the dead, the first-fruits of them that sleep.” Yet Gray, half Greek, seems to promise to his rustics and his hinds as their richest reward after life of swink and toil dear forgetfulness and eternal sleep. Swinburne was glad:
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
·····
Only the eternal sleep
In an eternal night.
Emily Brontë lusted for mere oblivion:
Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity.
And never care how rain may steep,
Or snow may cover me!
Flecker in utter despair wails out:
I know dead men are deaf, and cannot hear
The singing of a thousand nightingales …
I know dead men are blind and cannot see
The friend that shuts in horror their big eyes,
And they are witless—
Even more beautifully than the poets have sung, a weaver of exquisite prose has written: “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time.” Poor sorry souls! How arid, how empty are such aspirations when we think of the ardent glowing phrase of the Little Flower: “Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien sur la terre!” And “Even in the bosom of the Beatific Vision the Angels watch over us. No, I shall never be able to take any rest until the end of the world. But when the Angel shall have said ‘Time is no more,’ then I shall rest, then I shall be able to rejoice, since the number of the elect will be complete.”
So we see that even for those who take the most pagan, the most despairing, the most erroneous views, the ideal is oblivion and rest. How fearful a destiny then is that of the vampire who has no rest in the grave, but whose doom it is to come forth
