Religious motifs : Overview. Search. About religious motifs
Keywords:
House of God
Example 1:
But they were not talking about the moonlight; they were discussing a huge old stone that lay out in the yard, near the kitchen door, where the servants often placed their copper utensils, when they had been washed, to dry in the sun, and where the children usually played. As a matter of fact, it was an old tombstone.
"I believe," explained the master of the house, "that it came from the old ruined chapel of the convent. Pulpit and tombstones, with their epitaphs, were sold, and my departed father bought several of them. We broke up the others into paving stones, but we didn't use that one and left it lying in the yard."
"You can easily tell that it was a tombstone," said the eldest of the children. "You can still see an hourglass on it, and a piece of an angel, but the inscription is just about gone. You can make out the name 'Preben' and a capital 'S' just after it, and 'Martha' a little further down, but it is impossible to read any more.
Example 2:
"Yes, time and change come to all things. I can remember so clearly the day of the funeral, and Preben Svane following her coffin. A couple of years before, they had had their tombstone carved with names and inscriptions, just leaving the dates of their deaths blank; and that same evening the stone was set in its place on the grave. And only a year later the grave had to be reopened, for old Preben joined his wife again. It turned out that they were not so rich as people had thought, and the little they did leave went to distant relatives far away, to people who had never been heard of before. The old wooden house, with the bench under the linden tree at the top of the high stone staircase, was pulled down by order of the town council, for it was much too ruined to stand any longer. And later, the same fate befell the chapel, and the cemetery was leveled. Preben's and Martha's old tombstone was sold, like the rest, to anybody who wanted to buy it. And so it happened that it wasn't broken in pieces, but that it is now lying out there in the yard for the children to play on, or to be used as a shelf for the servant maid's kitchen utensils. And the paved street now covers the resting place of old Preben and his wife; and nobody ever thinks about them any more."
Then the old man who had told them the story shook his head sadly. "Yes, forgotten! All things are forgotten!"
The rest began to speak of other things, but the youngest child, a little boy with large, grave eyes, climbed up on a chair and peered through the curtains into the yard. The moon shone down brightly on the huge stone, which previously had seemed to the little boy very flat and dull, but which now had become like a page from a wonderful storybook. For the stone seemed to contain within it all that the little boy had heard about Preben and his wife. He looked down at the stone, then up at the brilliant moon, which seemed like a divine face peering down on the earth through the pure still air.
"Forgotten! All things are forgotten!" The words were again repeated in the room; and at that moment an invisible angel kissed him on the forehead and whispered softly, "Keep the seed carefully; cherish it until the time for ripening shall come. Through you, my child, shall the half-vanished inscription on the crumbling tombstone stand out in clear characters for generations yet to come. Through you shall the old couple once more walk arm in arm through the old streets and sit with smiling, rosy-cheeked faces on their bench under the linden tree, greeting rich and poor alike. From this moment on through the years, the seed shall ripen into a blooming poem. For the good and the beautiful perish never; they live eternally in story and song!"
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