e to assist at the
spiritualising of the bodily frame by natural process; a wonderful new
type of a kind of mortified grace being evolved by the way. The
spiritual body had anticipated the formal moment of death; the alert
soul, in that tardy decay, changing its vesture gradually, and as if
piece by piece. The infinite future had invaded this life perceptibly
to the senses, like the ocean felt far inland up a tidal river.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the attitude of questioning awe on the threshold
of another life displayed with the expressiveness of this unique morsel
of literature; though there is something of the same kind, in another
than the literary medium, in the delicate monumental sculpture of the
early Tuscan School, as also in many of the designs of William Blake,
often, though unconsciously, much in sympathy with those
unsophisticated Italian workmen. With him, as with them, and with the
writer of the Letter to a Friend upon the occasion of the death of his
intimate Friend,--so strangely! the visible function of death is but to
refine, to detach from aught that is vulgar. And this elfin letter,
really an impromptu epistle to a friend, affords the best possible
light on the general temper of the man [154] who could be moved by the
accidental discovery of those old urns at Walsingham--funeral relics of
"Romans, or Britons Romanised which had learned Roman customs"--to the
composition of that wonderful book the Hydriotaphia. He had drawn up a
short account of the circumstance at the moment; but it was after ten
years' brooding that he put forth the finished treatise, dedicated to
an eminent collector of ancient coins and other rarities, with
congratulations that he "can daily command the view of so many imperial
faces," and (by way of frontispiece) with one of the urns, "drawn with
a coal taken out of it and found among the burnt bones." The discovery
had resuscitated for him a whole world of latent observation, from
life, from out-of-the-way reading, from the natural world, and fused
into a composition, which with all its quaintness we may well pronounce
classical, all the heterogeneous elements of that singular mind. The
desire to "record these risen ashes and not to let them be buried twice
among us," had set free, in his manner of conceiving things, something
not wholly analysable, something that may be properly called genius,
which shapes his use of common words to stronger and deeper senses, in
a way unusua