Disawoval

This is a counterpoint to the earlier post. Copied, edited and pasted from an original with no disrespect to the same, but to context.Not entirely point-counterpoint, but appeals to the verse, rhyme, music searching intuitiveness.

“THOSE WHOM THE GODS LOVE DIE YOUNG"

No one can look without a touch of sorrow upon a work that death has intercepted. Stand in an orchard when the spring gales roughly fling the blossoms and the unformed fruit to shrivel on the grass. Or see that withered nosegay in the dusty road on which the evening vainly drops its quickening dew: why should a few wild roses, buttercups and poppies make one feel that being picked they would not have been thus left to die except for rue? Or read the half-told tale until you come to where the writer had to lay down the pen for ever. In a word, go when you will where death steps in to put an unexpected full stop in the sentence of a life. It seems indeed that, as Lord Tennyson said, our only teachers are time and God:
"The best is yet to be
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, 'a whole I planned,
Youth shows but half, trust God, see all, nor be afraid."

And yet, how few who have not known days when they wished they had died in youth, died when the whole world was small compared with their boundless hope, died when the sun and stars, and the hills and the flowers, and wide, wide sea still shimmered in gleaming brightness through an unrent veil of mist, died when faith still taught that this wicked world is good, died when ambition glowed with such fervour that no effort seemed great enough, died before time had revealed that a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a friend may be unkind, before death had wrung the heart dry of all comfort except one promise that Someone is the life, died, as Stevenson says, "in the hot-fit of life, a tip-toe on the highest point of being," whence one could pass "at a bound to the other side, the noise of the mallet and chisel scarcely quenched and the trumpets hardly done blowing."

The value of life cannot be measured by its length; a few years may leave an indelible trace on the world; much joy and sorrow may be crowded into a short intense existence-such for instance as Pompilia's, Shelley's, Ganymede's. And readers of Goethe cannot hear this last name without thinking of the upward longing, up and upward thither where young minds so easily, so fondly dwell,--where hearts can be that wish for room to love, where artist souls may linger when they dream of beauty that eludes them, where music seems to come uncalled to give expression to the tenderest emotions.

And with the bereaved one may indeed ask "why before then?" Why should we hear a mourner by a child's death-bed sobbing, "Is it good that a child should die? Is it good that the light should turn dark, the dawn die in east? Is it good that the frail fair spring should shrivel in an April frost that the blossoms and blooms should wither before summer's coming? Is it right that lambs should languish, that the birds should find closed beaks when they fly to their nests with food? Is it good a child should die, die in its lovely innocence, in its joy, in its hope, in its love? Why should death steal a life full of promise, full of unknown possibilities? Is it good? Is it good? Yet they say that the children that
die are the ones whom the gods love most!"

Few utterances are sadder than Marcus Aurelius’ words, "As autumn leaves thy little ones!" But surely that beautiful thought "to the not yet realized" betrays the golden malleable heart hidden by that steely will. There is the whole secret of that confident assertion that those whom the gods love die young. It is because there is somewhere deep down in the innermost recesses of every human heart the conviction that it is not to nothingness but to the "not yet realized" that we go when we leave this world.


But after all there comes, like half-obliterated memories fetched back to mind in later years, the knowledge that no death is premature. How can it be? We ask not for the privilege of living. What if it comes during the first young years? God calls a loved child; can we wonder that the child we love so deeply is one of those whom God loves too, so that He cannot spare him any longer? And in our most despondent moments we may hear, like some old melody that takes the mind back to loved scenes long since lost, the sweet words:--
"I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."

-----not my words--------------------------------------------------------------------