They have almost made funerals
unpopular by over-elaboration and display, especially what are called
public funerals, in which an effort is made to confer great distinction
on the dead. So far has it been carried often that there has been a
reaction of popular sentiment and people have wished the man were alive.
We prosecute everything so vigorously that we speedily either wear it out
or wear ourselves out on it, whether it is a game, or a festival, or a
holiday. We can use up any sport or game ever invented quicker than any
other people. We can practice anything, like a vegetable diet, for
instance, to an absurd conclusion with more vim than any other nation.
This trait has its advantages; nowhere else will a delusion run so fast,
and so soon run up a tree--another of our happy phrases. There is a
largeness and exuberance about us which run even into our ordinary
phraseology. The sympathetic clergyman, coming from the bedside of a
parishioner dying of dropsy, says, with a heavy sigh, "The poor fellow is
just swelling away."
Is Christmas swelling away? If it is not, it is scarcely our fault. Since
the American nation fairly got hold of the holiday--in some parts of the
country, as in New England, it has been universal only about fifty
years--we have made it hum, as we like to say.
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