The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-10-13
IDEAL DEATH.
New York Mercury.


 The feeling of the free and high spirits of all times has ever been that the ideal death was the sudden, or, at least, rapid one. All men who have thrown off in any degree the shackles of the material and the commonplace have at some period expressed wish that their passing over might be in this kind. The verdict of the un- thinking when the thread of life is snapped at the moment of it's richest promise of foriation is "the pity of it." Yet "they whom the gods love die early" means this only. Not young necessarily in the matter ot years, but young in illusion, in the power of dreams and visions; young in that the wine of life in the veins is still rich with the flavor of the grape.
 Curiously enough it is the epicure, throughout the long passing of the shadowy presences of history, who dies the easy death, not the ascetic. Those who quaffed the living elixir most eagerly seem always to have been those who could lay it down most philosophically; and an intel lectual curiosity for what might GA tend beyond the black veil appears to have upheld them, almost like the hope of a new sensation. A refined sensualist would find the death of Alexander the Great to have been part of an ideal fate. Stricken down at the apex of his glory, in moment of peace, filled with feasts more than Belshazzarean in their voluptuous magnificence, he fingered but ten days of low fever amid the hanging gar- dens of Babylon, removed from one dream like palace to another that he might be eased, and finally breathing his last ameng worshipers, who scarce dared touch his body after death lest they might defile holy thing. A singular resemblance of a sort, by the way, suggests itself between the death of Alexander and that of Skobeloff, who, likewise warrior to his fingers ends, and voluptuary, and one of the most picturesque personalities of modern times, died in the full flush of his fame drinking of such joys as Mo- hammed promised to his faithful ones, and as awaited the Morse heroes among the Valkyries of the Scandinavian heaven, not wisely, but too well.
 To the poet the death of Shelley must ever be a sort of ideal type. Drowned off the shore of Spezia, in the waters of that tideless Mediterra- mean he had loved so we'll, his recov- cred body was reduced to ashes on the spot where he had spent so many months in close communion with na- ture burned on pyre, with Italian skies above it, and the soft Italian wind to fan it's flame. His very heart fared we'll. For does it not lie ~Cor Cordium," saith the simple slab under the shadow of the Aurelian wall, in the little English cemetery in Rome, close by Keats, "whose name was writ in water?"
 Matthew Arnold wished that at his death he might be moved to some near window and, seeing, "bathed in the sacred dews of morn, the wide aerial landscape" spread before him, might feel the pure eternal course of life out side of himself, and, composed, re- freshed and ennobled, sink his willing spirit in its embrace.
 "There let me gaze till become
 In soul with what gaze on wedi"
 This is the desire of the Buddhist {; the desire of absorption into Nirvana, of final reunion at death of the spirit with the eternal principle of life.
 Where men and women have died for a cause they have always died beautiful deaths. All the Christian martyrs, it may be said, died happily as well as ideally. Moral heroism is contagious, and at times when all life has been swung upward from its nor maj clogged condition into a state of feverish high pressure, men and wo- men have seemed almost wholly to put away the fear of death. Thus it was during the French revolution when hundreds mounted the scaffold with unblanched scheek who might have seen the end approach with an agony of regret lying, in normal times, in their beds.
 Socrates, reasoning with his disci- pies the night before he drinks the bitter hemlock draught, is the type of the philosophic death. Perhaps there :. are few lovers who would not feel that Leander, overcome by the waves while straining every nerve to reach the further shore where Hero's arms awaited him, had not died ideally. And even poor lovelorn Sappho, springing from the rock to her own undoing for the sake of that bitter thing : passion unrequited, is more enviable in their sight than Dsatsr fa- mszias living prosaically to pick flaws ty. her lord and master,e armor. and to