St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1877-10-05
Posthumous Affection.

There is kind of love which never
fairly seems to ripen i'll this world till
the object of it has gone to another. So
long as the person endowed with this
love remains on the face of the earth.
that person would hardly suspect the
existence of the love, and hardly any
one else would either. Nothing to speak
of is done for that persons comfort bv
the loving party, nothing to make this
| world a pleasant place to stay in; he
or she, as the case may be, has sort
of warranty to live, if he or she choose,
and that is the whole of it.
| But let the individual depart from
this scene, and how the welkin rings
You would think such love never met
with such loss before; you will imagine
you never saw such devotion as this
living shows to this dead; and you
ignOrantly pity the dead who have gone
from the enjoyment of such lavish affec-
ton into the dark negation of the
grave.
This love, this pOsthumous affection,
is not confined to any peculiar form of
love; it is found between husband and
wife, on one side or the other impair
TALLY, between mother and son, father
and daughter, friend and friend. All
those family relatives who love each
other dearly by letter, and quarrel like
cats, as the saying is, when together,
share this sort of affection between
them sisters, whose mutual i'll temper
fOrbids any peace in the house when
together, idolize each other with all
sorts of tender remembrance of the vir-
tuOus and fOrgetfulness of the vicious
in their characters when the sea rolls
between them; mothers, whose sons
break their hearts when under the same
roof, think such sons supernal beings
when distance lends enchantment to
their view; grandparents, who fidget
every moment that their posterity is in
the house with them, think, when the
children have departed, that there never
were such glorious children-till they
are back again ; and husbands and
wives, who become unutterably weary
of each others fault-finding and ex-
action day by day, feel the separation
of absence to be an unnatural thing, and
yearn for each other-till they meet.
Absence weaves a halo round all these
heads, and very likely it is the heads
own fault if the halo disappears into
the idle and empty air of the common
place. And when the fiat of death ac-
cents this halo by setting the seal of
perpetuity upon it, how much more
extraordinary it becomes, and how
many saints of the family circle are
canonized who were very far from
saints in their worshippers' opinions
during life, and friends for whom they
never lifted finger when living and in
want, dead and famous, are, as the
world is given to think, among the
dearest persOnages of their life-drama
"The house is desert without them !"
cries the father who scarcely looked at
his babies in life, and never held them
a whole hour of their little year. "He
was saint and a martyrm cries the
mother whose Incidence sapped her
sons life blood and laid him in pre-
mature grave. "The fire has gone out
on my hearth !" sighs the husband who
never spent an evening with his wife
since their honeymoon. "What an an
gel of self-sacrifice she was J" says the
brother whose sister has poured out her
life on him till she has come to the end
of the measure.
And they are none of them conscious
ly hypOcIites. They every one believe
Wnat tney say. InoSe WHO quarleieu
with the living, having no longer any
thing to quarrel about with the dead,
are at liberty to see them altogether in
relation to the lovelier side of their
natures, and those that did not take the
pains to quarrel with them miss the
silent submission, the abiect subsection,
of their shadows. Now and then, in
deed, but only now and then, Thought
of what has been and knowledge OF
what might have been, together with
the inevitable pity that always wraps
the dead as much as their shroud, come
in the shape of remorse, and then this
posthumous affection becomes the suf-
fering and punishment that it deserves
to be.
1t is true that this remorse sometimes
visits us even in the instance of those
whom we loved tenderly and truly in