THE STRANGER’S FUNERAL.
Reading edition
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BY N. C. BROOKS.
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A solitary hearse without mourner or friend wheeled by me with unceremonious speed. It filled my heart with feelings of the most chilling desolation, which were augmented perhaps by the peculiar gloom of the evening. I reached the rude grave in which the corpse was deposited, and learned from the menial who was performing the last rites that it was a young German of fine talents, with whom I had travelled a few months before, who, far from his home and friends, had fallen a victim to the prevailing epidemic.—Letter of a Friend.
No solemn bell pealed on the air,
No train in sable gloom
Moved slow with the holy man of prayer
To stand around his tomb;
The hearse rolled on without sign of love
To the church, in lonely woe,
Where bent the solemn heavens above
The opened grave below:
But he recked not of the heavens o’ercast,
Or the yawning gulf of death;
For with him Earth’s bitterness had passed,
Ere passed his fleeting breath.
The stranger pressed a lonely bed,
No smiles dispelled the gloom
Of the dark and funeral shades that spread
Around his dying room;
And his heart with grief did melt,
And he wandered in fevered dreams
To the home where the loved of his youth still dwelt,
By the side of his own blue streams:
His heart for their voices yearned,
And the warm tears fell like rain,
As his dying eyes to the home were turned
That he ne’er should see again.
The stranger’s griefs are o’er,
And his body lies alone,
From his friends afar on a foreign shore
Without a funeral stone;
And long shall voices call,
And midnight tapers burn
For him that is bound in death’s cold thrall,
But he shall no more return:
He shall return no more
From his lowly sleep in dust,
’Till the trump announce death’s bondage o’er,
And the “rising of the just.”