The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1876-07-27
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 earth
above. Net the charnel- house upon which
attention has been so often fixed by poets
and preachers, but the upper realm of
rainbow and light, Of ever-shifting clouds,
of the golden glories of sunrise and sun
set, 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 very different aspect if we
could escape from the vulgar and repul-
sive associations of mere burial, which we
owe to graveyard poetry, food-for- worms
literature, and the emphatic parade of
interment The atmosphere is thousand
times more the theatcr of life than is the
earth beneath us. All living things are
born from it. The entire vegetable king
dom has been condensed out of its invisi
bic elements, and, in decay and dissolu-
ton, except a little ashy residue. it is all
again restored to the atmosphere. The
animal world follows the same law. All
scntient creatures are constructed out of
the vicwless medium above, and back to
its serene depths they are all at length re-
turned. The processes are slow, but they
arc complete and memorable; art cannot
arrest them. Though the body be EN-.
balmed for preservation, the course of ma
ture is only transiently checked, and the
discovered atoms soon find their way back
to their atmospheric home The crcma-
tionists are disquieted at burial and our
mortuary rites, and would send the dead
back in haste to the aerial world on the
wings of a bonfire. But why
be impatient? The grave is but
a convenient incident in the cycle
of transformations Nature will do
her own work in her own meas
,uredo and efficient way She has time
enough, and prefers to use it. Slowly and
gradually is life unfolded, and slowly and
gradually it is again infolded In fact,
the processes are so closely involved and
bound up in a common method that they
proceed together, 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
ucaCH, The constant QlSSOlutlOn OF the Or
ganic. system, and the expulsion of its
dead particles by respiration, is the essen
tial condition of continued life. We be-
gin to die as soon as we begin to live, and
are dying as long as we live. Nature con-
POUNDS 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 living body is "a whirl-
pool of destructive transformations inces-
sanity counteracted, in which life is the
constantly result If. to maintain
his vital energies and enable him to keep
up the course of his life-work, man of
seventy has had to drink upward of fifty
tons Of water, to eat thirty tons of solid
food, and inhale more than so, 600 pounds
of oxygen 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 worn out
machinery, when the changes cease to go
on in a co-ordinated way! That plant and
animal, in relation to the atmosphere, ex-
ert antagonizing influences, is well under
stood. One poisons and the other puri-
| ffes, and SO firmly does Nature hold the
balance on a grand scale, from epoch to
epoch, that the constitution of the atmos-
phere is kept in stable harmony with the
delicate requirements of living beings
b. L. YouDeans, in Appletons' journal.
:. -~ $500