The Republican journal., 1876-09-14
Our True Burial Place.

Over the places that receive the bodies
of the dead monuments are erected, as if
to mark the last Interchangeable abode of
the departed. Yet. even in the crudest
materialistic sense, our final home is not
in the earth. Nature soon rifles the grave
and disperses its contents into the atmos-
phere above Not the charnel house upon
which attention has been hitherto so in
tensey fixed by poets and preachers,
but the upper realm of rainbows and
light, of ever-shifting clouds, of the gold
en- glories of sunrise and sunset, the world
Of everlasting beauty in the refulgence
of the day and the splendors Of the night
this is. in reality, the tomb of man.
Even in the lowest sense, we need to look
beyond the grave; and death would wear
a very different aspect if we could escape
from the vulgar and repulsive associations
of mere burial, which we owe to grave
yard poetry, food-for-worms literature,
and the emphatic parade of interment.
The atmosphere is a thousand times more
the theatre OF life than is the earth beneath
us. All living things are born from it.
The entire vegetable kingdom has been
condensed out of its invisible elements,
and, in decay and dissolution, except a
little ashy residue, it is all again restored
TO the atmosphere. The animal world
follows the same law. All sentient crea-
lures are constructed out Of the viewless
| medium above, and back to its serene
| depths they are all at length returned.
| The processes are slow, but they are com
| plete and ineXorable; art cannot arrest
| them, Though the body be cmbalmed
for preservation, the course OF nature is
only transently checked, and the dissev
cred atoms soon find their way back to
their atmospheric home The cremation
lists are dsquieted at burial and our NOR
tuary rites, and would send the dead back
in haste to the aerial world on the wings
OF Il bonfire But why be impatient? The
grave is but Il convenient incident in the
cycle of transformations Nature will do
her own work in her own measured and
efficient way She has time enough, and
prefers to use it, Slowly and gradually
is lie untolded, and slowly and gradually
it is again inlolded. In fact, the processes
are 50 closely involved and bound up in II
common method that they proceed togeth-
er, and life and death are but different
sides of the same thing. The atmosphere
| that is finally to claim us is also taking US
back to itself moment by moment, in every
breath. Interstitial death, the constant
dissolution of the organic system, and the
expulsion of its dead particles by respra-
ton, Is the essential condition Of continu-
ed life We begin to die as soon as we
begin to live, and are dying as long as we
live Nature contounds our convenient
distinctions, and tells us that a man does
twenty times more dying in the course of
his life than in his final demise. The liv-
ing body is a whirlpool Of destructive
transformations necessarily counteracted,
in which life is the constantly-sustaincd
result If, to maintain his vital energies
and enable him to keep up the course of
his lite-work. a man Of seventy has had
to drink upward of fifty tons Of water to
eat thirty tons Of solid TODD, and inhale
more than fifty thousand pounds of oXy-
gen gas, which have been expended in
the vital reactions Of living and dying,
how little, comparatively, of death is there
in that final arrangement of his WORKOUT
machinery, when the changes cease to 90
on in u coordinate way. That pla,t and
animal, i'll relation to the atmosphere, eX-
ert antagonizing influences, is well under
stood. One poisons and the other purilies,
and SO firmly does Nature hold the balance
on Il grand scale, from epoch to epoch,
that the constitution OF the atmosphere is
kept in stable harmony with the delicate
requirements of living beings. E. l..
1oumans, in Appleton's journal.