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Updated: May 28, 2025
They were often decorated gruesomely with skull and crossbones, scythes, coffins, and hour-glasses, all-seeing eyes with rakish squints, bow-legged skeletons, and miserable little rosetted winding-sheets. A writer in the New England Courant of November 12, 1722, says: Of all the different species of poetry now in use I find the Funeral Elegy to be most universally admired and used in New England.
So that as Plato had an imagination, That all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion. Whereby you may see, that the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below. Certain it is, that the matter is in a perpetual flux, and never at a stay. The great winding-sheets, that bury all things in oblivion, are two; deluges and earthquakes.
There are some departed whom we bury in the earth, but there are others more deeply loved for whom our souls are winding-sheets, whose memory mingles daily with our heart-beats; we think of them as we breathe; they are in us by the tender law of a metempsychosis special to love. A soul is within my soul. When some good thing is done by me, when some true word is spoken, that soul acts and speaks.
I shuddered again, and meseemed the grey clouds in the sky waxed blacker, while deathly pale airy forms floated through the mist over the pools, in long, waving winding-sheets.
Three succumbed, among them two brothers, who died the same night, “locked,” as testified by Bahá’u’lláh, “in each other’s arms.” The carpet used by Him He gave to be sold in order to provide for their winding-sheets and burial. The paltry sum obtained after it had been auctioned was delivered to the guards, who had refused to bury them without first being paid the necessary expenses.
What is a still more touching proof of the devotion of these two good women is that they carefully took off the sheets of the Prince's bed, vowing that these should be neither washed nor used again till they should serve each of them as winding-sheets. Kingsburgh accompanied his guests part of the way, assisted Charles to change his dress in a little wood, and then, with tears, bade him farewell.
Immediately there did appear to me six children in winding-sheets, which called me aunt, which did most grievously affright me; and they told me they were my sister Baker's children of Boston, and that Goody Nurse, Mistress Corey of Charlestown and an old deaf woman at Boston murdered them, and charged me to go and tell these things to the magistrates, or else they would tear me to pieces, for their blood did cry for vengeance.
Alas! the horns and fiddles sound no more, the merry, grinning players are but a pinch of dust like their betters, their haughty master but a scorned memory where once he reigned so royally, while the modish guests who frisked it so gayly in satin and velvet have long, long ago shaken the powder out of their locks, tied up their jaws and packed themselves away in their scant winding-sheets, resigned to the mournful company of the worm.
Isn't it second-sight when you can tell if people are going to die? You see them in their winding-sheets, and they are low down if it will only be rather soon. But if it is to be quite directly their shrouds are wrapped round them high up. What was mine like, that you said Percival Thorne was so lucky? Up to here?" And, standing before him, she smiled and touched her chin.
Their bodies are first bowelled, then dried upon hurdles till they be very dry, and so about the most of their joints and neck they hang bracelets, or chains of copper, pearl, and such like, as they used to wear. Their inwards they stuff with copper beads, hatchets, and such trash. Then lap they them very carefully in white skins, and so roll them in mats for their winding-sheets.
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