Jones, H. Bedford

English

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MISCELLANEOUS.A BREATH FROM NIRVANA.BY H. BEDFORD JONES.I gripped the coverlet in pain, and thereDeatli's fore-word came to me. I saw the greatIneffable, the nameless glorj'-stateThat waited on my soul, and loomed so fairAcross the Void; the angel-thronged StairLeading unto the Throne, the sun-streamed Gate—These lay before me, seeming but to waitDeath's final kiss, within my heart a prayer."Now come, sweet Death, and close this Heaven-pact !'Then sudden fell a light across the sun.And I—I shrieked and died ; for, heavenless,My sundered spirit found the Nature Fact,Cast unto fragments, joined within the OneAnd All, the Universal Nothingness.SCHILLER'S SKULL.Goethe has written a poem on the contemplation of Scliiller's skull, andit is well known that the great German poet kept this skull on his desk beforehim in constant commemoration of his beloved friend. The skull was dugup from the Grand Ducal mausoleom where Schiller's body had been placedsoon after his death. In 1826, twenty years after Schiller's death, the mauso-leum had to be rebuilt so as to make room for more bodies, and at that timethe Mayor of Weimar, Carl Leberccht Schwabe, selected this skull, fully con-vinced that it was the skull of the great poet, and some highly respectedphysicians confirmed him in this view. In the meantime the suspicion grewstronger and stronger that the skull could not have been that of Schiller, andthat Goethe had wasted his reverence on the relics of a lesser man.Prof. Hermann Welker, an anatomist of Halle, was led to this conclu-sion from a number of corroborating circumstances. There is a death maskof Schiller made in plaster of Paris, and also a plaster of Paris reproductionof his skull, made before the great poet's body was deposited in the mauso-leum. The mask is still in the possession of the Schwabe family, the descen-dants of the Mayor of Weimar. Both casts differ from the skull which wasin Goethe's possession, and are positive evidence that it can not be genuine.Dr. von Froriep, a native of Weimar, took a deep interest in the questionand has finally succeeded in discovering the genuine skull of Schiller. He

A Breath from Nirvana (Poem).

https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2768&amp;context=ocj

A Breath from Nirvana (Poem).

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