Need we wonder, that in a christian country, and among families of the best training, such impressions have become so universal, that they, who would be reputed brave, blazon their courage, by affirming their readiness to sleep in a cemetery, or the funeral vault of a church! It requires no extraordinary effort, and nothing more than the simple triumph of reason among the faculties, to enable any man, to sleep alone in a charnel house with as little dread, as in the apartment of an inn, so that the places were alike in comfort and salubrity. It does not require us to be wise, or courageous; but simply not cowards and fools, to feel as little horror in the view of corpses, as statues of plaster or marble. One of the most terrible ideas of death, after all, is, that we shall thus, immediately upon our decease, inflict this shrinking revulsion of terror upon all, who look at our remains.
The view, which reason takes of the sick and dying bed is, that, in the far greater number of mortal cases, the transition from life to death is as imperceptible, as the progress of the sun and the seasons. One faculty dies after another. The victim has received the three warnings unconsciously. Ordinarily, a person may be said to have paid a third part of his tribute of mortality at forty-five; half at fifty-five; and the whole at three score and ten.
When acute and severe sickness assails the patient, he has passed through what may be called the agony of death at a very early period of his disease. His chief suffering is past, as soon the irritability and the vigorous powers of life have been broken down. When the disorder assumes the typhoid and insensible form, the dull sleep, that precedes the final rest of the tomb, is already creeping upon him; and severe suffering is precluded. If there are convulsions after this, as often happens, they are seldom more than spasmodic movements, impressed by the nervous action upon the tendons, more terrible to the beholder, than the sufferer; differing little from those starts and struggles, with which many persons in high health commence sleeping and waking. He who has experienced the sensation of fainting, and, still more, of an epileptic fit, has suffered, I am ready to believe, all that there is in dying.