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Updated: May 26, 2025
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life; great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus.
I admit the secondary causes of the Reformation, which are very important, the awakened spirit of inquiry in the sixteenth century, the revival of poetry and literature and art, the breaking up of feudalism, fortunate discoveries, the introduction of Greek literature, the Renaissance, the disgusts of Christendom, the voice of martyrs calling aloud from their funeral pyres; yea, the friendly hand of princes and scholars deploring the evils of a corrupted Church.
Those among the dead that had come from diverse realms and were utterly friendless were piled together in thousands of heaps and, at the command of Yudhishthira, were caused to be burnt by Vidura through a large number of persons acting coolly and influenced by good-will and affection, on pyres made of dry wood.
"A letter to the Company's Resident at Abu, reporting to him that Hindoo widows are still compelled in this city to burn themselves to death above their husbands' funeral pyres." The Rajput grinned. "Does the Resident sahib not know it, then?" "There will be no chance of his not knowing should my report reach him!" "I will see, sahib, what can be done, then, in the matter.
There is nothing in his hues to provoke deep passion or to stimulate the yearnings of the soul: the pure blushes of the dawn and the crimson pyres of sunset are nowhere in the world that he has painted.
And here, as in Calcutta, we saw the bodies of the dead being cremated in public, in the open air, along the river's bank, the pyres being prepared as already described. On one of the bodies brought to the funereal pile, covered with a plain sheet, it was observed that flowers had been strewn, and pale, white rose-buds were in the folded hands.
Meanwhile Dawn had raised her gracious light on weary men, bringing back task and toil: now lord Aeneas, how Tarchon, have built the pyres on the winding shore. Hither in ancestral fashion hath each borne the bodies of his kin; the dark fire is lit beneath, and the vapour hides high heaven in gloom.
Pilgrims, delirious with fanaticism, do sometimes throw themselves under the ponderous wheels and perish there, but the stories current among writers upon the subject as to the large number of these victims are much exaggerated. This self-immolation, like that of the burning of widows upon their husband's funeral pyres, has latterly been suppressed.
Nor was the forest to any appreciable extent like much Virginian forest of today, second growth, invaded, hewed down, and renewed, to hear again the sound of the axe, set afire by a thousand accidents, burning upon its own funeral pyres, all its primeval glory withered. The forest of old Virginia was jocund and powerful, eternally young and eternally old.
Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception.
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