Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/636

 618 form of dissolution revealed to us even now in perfect, though exceptional, illustration. We have all seen Nature, in rare instances, vindicating herself despite the social opposition to her, and showing how tenderly, how soothingly, how like a mother with her foot on the cradle, she would, if she were permitted, rock us all gently out of the world; how, if the free-will with which she has armed us were brought into accord with her designs, she would give us the riches, the beauties, the wonders of the universe for our portion so long as we could receive and enjoy them; and at last would gently withdraw us from them, sense by sense, with such imperception that the pain of the withdrawal would be unfelt and indeed unknown.

Ten times in my own observation I remember witnessing, with attentive mind, these phenomena of natural euthanasia. Without pain, anger, or sorrow, the intellectual faculties of the fated man lose their brightness. Ambition ceases or sinks into desire for repose. Ideas of time, of space, of duty, lingeringly pass away. To sleep and not to dream is the pressing, and, step by step, still pressing need; until at length it whiles away nearly all the hours. The awakenings are short and shorter; painless, careless, happy awakenings to the hum of a busy world, to the merry sounds of children at play, to the sounds of voices offering aid; to the effort of talking on simple topics and recalling events that have dwelt longest on the memory; and then again the overpowering sleep. Thus on and on, until, at length, the intellectual nature is lost, the instinctive and merely animal functions, now no longer required to sustain the higher faculties, in their turn succumb and fall into the inertia.

This is death by Nature, and when mankind has learned the truth, when the time shall come—as come it will—that "there shall be no more an infant of days, nor an old man who hath not filled his days," this act of death, now, as a rule, so dreaded because so premature, shall, arriving only at its appointed hour, suggest no terror, inflict no agony.

The sharpness of death removed from those who die, the poignancy of grief would be almost equally removed from those who survive, were natural euthanasia the prevailing fact. Our sensibilities are governed by the observance of natural law and the breach of it. It is only when Nature is vehemently interrupted that we either wonder or weep. Thus the old Greeks, fathers of true mirth, who looked on prolonged, grief as an offense, and attached the word madness to melancholy, even they were so far imbued with sorrow when the child or youth died, that they bore the lifeless body to the pyre in the break of the morning, lest the sun should behold so sad a sight as the young dead; while we, who court rather than seek to dismiss melancholy, who find poetry and piety in melancholic reverie, and who indulge too often in what, after a time, becomes the luxury of woe, experience a gradation of suffering as we witness the work of death. For the