# Francesca Carrara/Chapter 57

CHAPTER XXX.
"How soon Our new-born light Attains to full-aged noon! And this, how soon to grey-haired night! We spring, we bud, we blossom, and we blast, Ere we can count our days—our days they flee so fast." Quarles.
Francesca was not an hour absent from Guido's room; but on her return, a deathlike sickness came over her as she marked the great change that had taken place in him. The face had suddenly fallen in, the temples were sunk, and the blue and livid mouth seemed unwarmed by the breath that still faintly struggled forth. His wasted hands were stretched out, and worked with a quick and convulsive motion, as if catching some small substances which kept eluding their grasp; while his closed eyes ever and anon opened feebly, and then shut again—they appeared to ask when they should close for ever.
A slant ray of golden sunshine entered the chamber; it drew nearer and nearer as the hour went by, till it fell on Guido's bed. The invalid ​turned his head, and looked with a smile upon that glad and glorious light. "It is a good omen!" said he, in a very low but distinct voice; and continued to watch it till his eyes closed from weariness. A moment after his teeth clenched, as if with violent pain; it was soon past and be grew calm again. Once or twice his lips moved, but the sounds were inarticulate, and the pulse grew more and more faint.
Francesca hung over him in breathless agony; she knew that life was slowly ebbing. Suddenly he opened his eyes, and looked up at her with an expression of strong affection. She fancied, too, that he whispered her name—it was his last effort! The sunbeam approached; but when it shone upon Guido's face life had passed away to return no more! The radiant line illumined the set features of the corse!
Yes, the soul had departed from its mysterious tenement, with which it was so strangely allied, and so still more strangely suited—that long variance is now for aye at rest. The burning passion will no more contend with the ethereal aspiring; the two opposite principles of fevered existence have ceased their conflict. Out of the body grew all that was base, mean, and degraded,—that ​rottenness at the core of our noblest hopes, that weakness in the truest of our affections. Strange that it should thus control the spiritual; but the grave is opened, and there let it perish in darkness and in corruption. Not so the soul, which gave it imagination, intellect, affection, hope—all that can redeem mortality; in their very nature these are imperishable, and out of them have grown all good things on earth. The lasting works of philosophy and poetry, the long-enduring efforts that have been wrought in marble, the pyramids whose age we know not, the statue still a vision of beauty, the influence that individual minds have exercised over their kind,—all these are types of that immortality which gives life to our present, and will give eternity to our future. Faint, but glorious revealings of another world!
A weary burden is our human life, from the first even to the last. We talk of the happiness of childhood!—in what does it consist?—in the denied delight, and in the enforced task! Think how the child must turn from the wearisome page, whose future value it is impossible then to appreciate—turn from its dry and intricate characters to gaze upon the sun shining on the grass, and grudge the hours that must pass before play-time! ​Think, too, with what unkindness and what injustice they are often treated! How often must the infant heart swell with the quick sense of oppression, when the caprice of an angry moment punishes the fault which has been often passed over, till impunity had appeared a right! And yet restraint is a necessity. Every indulgence from the first exacts some bitter penalty; and we dread and curb the present, for the sake of the retribution which ever lies amid the shadows of the future.
From the beginning of life to its close, we are haunted by the dread of the to come. Now to childhood, taught by no painful experience, how irksome must this yoke appear! They are galled and checked, and must submit; they know not that all our actions, even the most trivial, are followed by those sad and ghastly spectres—their consequences; but they feel their iron oppression. Or, to pass on to youth, with its warm feelings, so sensitive to the return which they will not meet, so sure in a few passing years to be crushed and withered; but at what expense of misery, let each ask of the records from his own remembrance! True, its hopes are sweet, and its spirits buoyant; but how soon are those hopes disappointed, and those spirits broken down for ever! ​How often during that period of fervour and of heart-burning, must we be forced to shrink within ourselves with all the mortifying consciousness of unreturned affection, of ill-placed confidence, of too kind, and hence erroneous, judgment. The time while such ordeals are being passed, and such lessons being learned, cannot be one of much happiness.
Is its successor better off? Surely no. Look at the arduous exertion required of middle life; the thronging anxieties that spring up for others more than for ourselves; the constant downfal of our best-laid projects; the disappointment attending on the result of those which had mocked us with success; the weariness which gradually steals over the mind; the daily increasing sense of the worthlessness of every thing; the mournful looking back on the many friends who have parted from our side, some gone down to the grave, but more parted from us by the estrangement of cooled attachments and jarring interest. We have lost, too, all those fresh and beautiful emotions which, if they could not make a world of their own, at least flung their glory over the actual one. These are departed, to return no more; and in their places have come discontent, suspicion, indifference, and, worst of all, worldliness. Through ​such rough paths do we travel on to old age; and has life there garnered up its treasures to the last? Ah, no! The dust, to which we are so soon to return, lies thick upon the heart; the affections are grown cold; and all vivid emotions have ceased. But the calm is that of monotony, not of content, and is ruffled by the thousand small pettishnesses of temper,—temper which grows stronger as all other faculties weaken and decay. And yet, throughout this busy and excited pilgrimage, whose present would seem so engrossing, man is ever looking beyond it; he never loses the internal consciousness of something undeveloped in his nature—something spiritual and aspiring, which belongs not to earth. That which is good within us seems to claim a requital not of this world; that which is bad trembles before some vague and awful anticipation of judgment. Were it but for the sake of justice, we must believe in a future state—futurity, that only though hidden key to the incomprehensible now! How plainly is vanity of vanities written upon that glorious science, ay, glorious even in its weakness, which once read the history of the earth in the skies, which asked from the stars the mysteries of their shining chronicles, and bade them reveal the future, from the mighty annals of nations and peoples down to the tender ​secrets of one lonely and beating heart. And yet how vain was such knowledge! What could the soothsayer foreshow that we knew not before? The future is written in the past; and if we prophesy, it is with eyes that look behind. Let the prophet tell us to the letter of the days to come—we have lived them already; circumstances may mock us with change of form, but the substance remains the same. We shall go through the same rounds of cares whose anxieties were wasted on what never happened—of vain pleasures whose emptiness we felt even while endeavouring to enjoy them—of sorrows cured by forgetfulness—of envyings, hatreds, regrets, and weariness. What needs there to repeat what we perfectly understood? No: the seer's knowledge, to be of aught avail, must pass the boundary of our little existence—it must pierce the shadows of the grave. Let him open but one secret of that far and dark eternity, and its purchase were well worth all life.
There have been those who on the scaffold have bidden a bold welcome unto Death, as the mighty revealer of the unknown. Such reliance was, methinks, lightly founded. Who knows how many links we may have to ascend in the vast cycle of worlds around, ere we arrive at the one which is knowledge—where we may look before, ​and after, and judge of the whole? How many stages of probation may we yet have to pass! But can any lot be more bitter than that which was cast on earth? Will its memory endure? Verily there is a deep voice in every heart which answers—Yes. Worn, wasted, crushed, as they are, how strong are the affections which bind us to our world! God of that Heaven to whose justice we bow, and on whose mercy we rely, surely those strong and dear feelings were not given in vain! Perhaps the gloomy barrier of the cold and desolate tomb once passed, the soul will be but more intensely conscious of that love which shadowed forth its existence in this life. Will those who have gone before await us on the other side?—and shall we be permitted to watch the arrival of those whom to leave made the only pang of death? Will the hidden and unrequited love be there acknowledged in earnest gratitude for its long endurance?—will it be allowed to breathe the free and happy air of heaven? How vain to inquire—and yet we inquire on! We ask of that which answers not. But when we recall how feverish, how wretched, how incomplete has been the life of mortality, we feel that the present owes us a future.