small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster.
Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed
was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions;
apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity;
ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for so much by laymen as
by ministers of the Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as
by the Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as by Quaker women?

This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death,--the
possibility of a man's dying. It seems as if no man had ever died
in America before; for in order to die you must first have lived.
I don't believe in the hearses, and palls, and funerals that they
have had. There was no death in the case, because there had been
no life; they merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had
rotted or sloughed along. No temple's veil was rent, only a hole
dug somewhere. Let the dead bury their dead. The best of them
fairly ran down like a clock. Franklin,--Washington,--they were
let off without dying; they were merely missing one day. I hear
a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have
died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it.
They haven't got life enough in them. They'll deliquesce like
fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they
left off. Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.
Do you think that you are going to die, sir? No! there's no hope
of you. You haven't got your lesson yet. You've got to stay after
school. We make a needless ado about capital punishment,--taking
lives, when there is no life to take. Memento mori! We don't
understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured
on his gravestone once. We've interpreted it in a grovelling and
snivelling sense; we've wholly forgotten how to die.