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Channing's piety and wisdom had such weight in Boston that the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held." "Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity, the squalid contentment of the times." The politicians he scores constantly. "Who that sees the meanness of our politics but congratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud and forever safe."
Without this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud. So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper.
Every rope and shroud was thrumming and screeching in resistance to the fierce weight of the squall. "Stand by main halyards! Jump!" he could hear Skipper shouting loudly; also he heard the high note of the mainsheet screaming across the sheaves as Van Horn, bending braces in the dark, was swiftly slacking the sheet through his scorching palms with a single turn on the cleat.
Her mother had relapsed into her ordinary calmness, rather wounding Leslie's perceptions when she allowed herself to think of it, for she did not read the lingering assiduity that was so intent it might have been employed upon her shroud. And there was no one else no; Leslie was quite unaware that her gladness was ominous.
It is this obedience to the life of the spirit that Whitman had in mind when he said: "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud." It was the full flowering of the law of mutuality and service that he saw when he said: "I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth. I dream'd that it was the new City of Friends.
No living being can lie on the edge of a big pine forest when twilight brings the darkness without the feeling that everything becomes too wonderful for words. The children as ever fed his fantasy, while he thought he did it all himself. Dusk wore a shroud to entangle the too eager stars, and make them stay. 'I never noticed it before, murmured Monkey against his coat sleeve.
The skirt of her shroud hung like a wet weed in the falling torrent. I kneeled in the river, and crept nearer with outstretched arms: when the vanishing ice set the dead form free, it should rest in those arms the last gift of the life-dream for then, surely, I must die. 'Let me pass in the agony of a lonely embrace! I cried. As I spoke she moved.
The room was bright with lights; the table was set, and the Naabs, large and small, were standing expectantly. As Hare found a place behind them Snap Naab entered with his wife. She was as pale as if she were in her shroud. Hare caught Mother Ruth's pitying subdued glance as she drew the frail little woman to her side. When August Naab began fingering his Bible the whispering ceased.
"Oh, your majesty," cried the Countess Dann, while her eyes filled with sympathizing tears, "would that the world could see with what devotion the great Maria Theresa sits in the stillness of the night, and with her own hands prepares her husband's shroud!"
"In olden times," she went on, "they used to say that a dead body would bleed if its murderer came in contact with it. What then would happen here if I, his daughter, his cherished child, loaded with benefits, enriched with his jewels, warm with his kisses, should be the thing they accuse me of? Would not the body of the outraged dead burst its very shroud and repel me?"
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