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To provide the dead with food and drink, to recall their virtues in dirges, to bring sacrifices in their honor, such rites were practised, as much from a desire to secure the favor of the dead and to ward off their evil designs as from motives of piety, which, of course, were not absent.
What can keep an Irishman down in the ditch when bullets are flying in air, "murmuring dirges" and "shells are shrieking requiems?" You may readily imagine an Irishman on the firing line, poking his head above the ground, exclaiming: "Did yez see that? And where did that Dago pill come from now? Shure it spoke Spanish, but it did not hit me at all, at all, Begorra!"
Many readers may like to see his subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together. They are as follows: "Nature." "Human Life." "Intellectual." "Contemplation." "Moral and Religious." "Heroic." "Personal." "Pictures." "Narrative Poems and Ballads." "Songs." "Dirges and Pathetic Poems." "Comic and Humorous." "Poetry of Terror." "Oracles and Counsels."
His long improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher.
Of these, one died five days before Aemilius's triumph, at the age of fourteen, and the other, twelve years old, died three days after it; so that there was no Roman that did not grieve for him, and all trembled at the cruelty of fortune, which had burst into a house filled with joy and gladness, and mingled tears and funeral dirges with the triumphal paeans and songs of victory.
As a consequence of this universal panic, the last days of the year 999 presented a spectacle never before seen; it was even fabulous! Light-headed indulgence and groans; peals of laughter and lamentations; maudlin songs and death dirges. Here the shouts and the frantic dances of supposed last and supreme orgies; yonder the lamentations of pious canticles.
The writers of the English bourgeoisie are crying murder at the demoralising tendency of the great cities, like perverted Jeremiahs, they sing dirges, not over the destruction, but the growth of the cities. Sheriff Alison attributes almost everything, and Dr. Vaughan, author of "The Age of Great Cities," still more to this influence.
I saw Dennistoun talking for some time with the Vicar of St Bertrand's, and as we drove away he said to me: 'I hope it isn't wrong: you know I am a Presbyterian but I I believe there will be "saying of Mass and singing of dirges" for Alberic de Mauléon's rest. Then he added, with a touch of the Northern British in his tone, 'I had no notion they came so dear.
Into his hand there is given a scale by which life is known in its fair proportions; a tranquil joy, disturbed neither by dirges nor Epinician odes, is poured into his heart and exalts him above distraction.
They would as soon be weeping as singing; have you not seen them hurrying to the hut to coronach upon a corpse, with the eager step of girls going to the last dance of the harvest? Beldames, witches, I hate your dirges, that are but an old custom of lamentation!
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