The Premature Burial

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THERE are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing,

but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate

fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to

offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the

severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill,

for example, with the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the

accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon,

of the Plague at London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of

the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the Black

Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact - -- it is the

reality - -- it is the history which excites. As inventions, we

should regard them with simple abhorrence.

I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august calamities

on record; but in these it is the extent, not less than the character

of the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need not

remind the reader that, from the long and weird catalogue of human

miseries, I might have selected many individual instances more

replete with essential suffering than any of these vast generalities

of disaster. The true wretchedness, indeed -- the ultimate woe - --

is particular, not diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of agony are

endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass - -- for this let

us thank a merciful God!

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of

these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.

That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be

denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from

Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one

ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in

which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of

vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions,

properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the

incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen

mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the

wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the

golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?

Apart, however, from the inevitable conclusion, a priori that such

causes must produce such effects - -- that the well-known occurrence

of such cases of suspended animation must naturally give rise, now

and then, to premature interments -- apart from this consideration,

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