The coffin was deposited in the little
parlor, and the carriages drove to Parker's for the night.
The stricken and lonely mother was in the sanctity of her own room.
The children had cried themselves to sleep and forgetfulness. The
brother, who had been sent for, could not reach home until the next
morning.
Barton had declined the offers of kind friends to remain, and was
alone with his dead. The coffin-lid had been removed, and he lifted
the dead-cloth from the face. He could not endure the sharp angle of
the nose, that so stabbed up into the dim night, unrelieved by the
other features.
The wrath of a strong, deep nature, thoroughly aroused, is sublime;
its grief, when stirred to its depths, is awful. Barton knew now
what had happened and what he had lost. The acuteness of his fine
organization had recovered its sharpest edge. The heavens had been
darkened for him nearly a year before, but now the solid earth had
been rent and one-half cloven away, and that was the half that
held the only hopes he had. He didn't calculate this now. Genius,
intellect, imagination, courage, pride, scorn, all the intensities of
his nature, all that he supposed he possessed, all that lay hidden
and unsuspected, arose in their might to overcome him now. He did not
think, he did not aspire, or hope, or fear, or dream, or remember: he
only felt, and bled, and moaned low, hopeless, helpless moans. If it
is given to some natures to enjoy intensely, so such correspondingly
suffer; and Bart, alone with his pale, cold, dead brother, through
this deep, silent night, abandoned himself utterly to the first
anguish at his loss, and it was wise.
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