Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's HistoryGodbey, Allen Howard
History
Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's History
Godbey, Allen Howard
Disasters
These incidents will suffice. Thousands of the same sort might be given.
No wonder that many were crazed with grief. One woman, wife and mother,
sole survivor of a happy family, was found sitting in the wreck, holding
in her arms her family clock which she had found. She told her story
without a tear. Her mind was unbalanced. A man who had never been known
to touch liquor was found the day after the flood, reeling to the
bridge, drunk and raving, determined to drown himself. In agony at the
loss of all he held dear, he had taken to drink, that he might remember
his misery no more; but in vain: whisky could not destroy his terrible
memories. Talmage in a letter to the New York _World_, said: “Such an
avalanche of horrors never slipped upon any American city. Horrors piled
on horrors, woe augmenting woe; bankruptcy, orphanage, widowhood,
childlessness, obliterated homesteads, gorged cemeteries and scenes so
excruciating it is a marvel that any one could look upon them and escape
insanity * * * *
“Was the work of devastation as great as I supposed? Far worse. Types
can not tell it. Only the eye can make revelation. But the worst part of
it can not be seen. The heart-wreck caused by the sudden departure of so
many can be open only to one eye, and that the All-Seeing. Think of one
family of fourteen all dead except one, and that the wife and mother,
and she the witness of their drowning. I saw the grave trench in which
two hundred and sixty were buried, and the whole graveyard like a
national cemetery, in which the unrecognized dead have a particular
number placed above them and are recorded in the undertaker’s rooms
with a description of the body and clothes.”
On many a life a shadow has been cast that will never be lifted. Many a
heart will ache until it breaks. One who had lost wife and children and
was alone, whose verses and whose name the world has never heard, more
than thirty years ago wrote the following most touchingly beautiful
lines, which will find an echo in the hearts of thousands of survivors
of the Johnstown flood, as well as among countless millions of others in
every age of the world:
Down by the cedar sitting,
Lonely and sad and still,
Watching the shadows flitting
Over the distant hill.
Yearning for by-gone hours,
Never again to come;
Longing for beauteous flowers,
Never again to bloom.
Ever there flits before me
A shadowy form and face;
Ever it hovers o’er me,
Wearing a nameless grace.
Above my brow there lingers
A breath like summer air;
Unseen and loving fingers
Stray through my tangled hair.
Silence, slow creeping nigh me,
Out from the leafy shade,
Bringeth the dead hours by me,
And rests on the darkening glade.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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