How mighty an experience
it is to wait where world overlaps the edge of world, and feel the
vastness of eternity around us! A moment ago--or was it many ages?--he
spoke. Now he is gone, leaving a strange visible image lying there to
awe us. The dead take sudden majesty. They become as gods. We think they
hear us when we speak of them, and their good becomes sacred. A dead
face has all human faults wiped from it; and that Shape, that Presence,
whose passiveness seems infinite, how it fills the house, the town, the
whole world, while it stays!
The hardest problem we have to face here is the waste of our best
things,--of hopes, of patience, of love, of days, of agonizing labor, of
lives which promise most. Rice's astonishment at the brutal waste of
himself had already passed off his countenance. The open eyes saw
nothing, but the lips were closed in sublime peace.
"And his sister," wept Angelique. "Look at Mademoiselle Zhone, also."
The dozen negroes, old and young, led by Achille, began to sob in music
one of those sweet undertone chants for the dead which no race but
theirs can master.
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