The northwest end of
Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this
pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the granary below, was
so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was,
unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at
it silently. As they gazed, Thackeray gave utterance in a tremulous,
gentle, and rapid voice to what all were feeling, in the word,
'CALVARY!' The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other
things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he
seldom did, of divine things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of
salvation, expressing his simple faith in God and in his Saviour."
Thackeray was found dead in his bed on Christmas morning, and he
probably died without pain. His mother and his daughters were sleeping
under the same roof when he passed away alone. Dickens told me that,
looking on him as he lay in his coffin, he wondered that the figure he
had known in life as one of such noble presence could seem so shrunken
and wasted; but there had been years of sorrow, years of labor, years of
pain, in that now exhausted life. It was his happiest Christmas morning
when he heard the Voice calling him homeward to unbroken rest.
HAWTHORNE.
* * * * *
_A hundred years ago Henry Vaughan seems almost to have anticipated
Hawthorne's appearance when he wrote that beautiful line,_
"_Feed on the vocal silence of his eye_.
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