obituaries and funeral orations
Obituaries, Funeral Orations and Remembrances
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obituaries and funeral orations
obituaries and funeral orations
Voltairine de Cleyre, “Kate Austin” (1902)
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Kate Austin “It’s aw a muddle.” That’s how I feel, thinking of the death of her. Why should she have died, she who was so full of energy and purpose, and so many to live on who are not now, and never were, and never will be anything but aimless, listless, useless, lumps of organized dust! The old, old question,—as senseless and as useless as aught a human being can ask, and bound to beget the answer, “There is no sense at all in anything. ‘It’s aw a muddle.’” I never […]
obituaries and funeral orations
Voltairine de Cleyre, “Dyer D. Lum”
Dyer D. Lum February 15, 1839–April 6, 1893 One of the silent martyrs whose graves are trodden to the level by their fellows’ feet, almost before it is seen that they have fallen, completed his martyrdom one year ago to-night. There are thousands of such, why then commemorate this one? Let our answer be that in this one we commemorate all the others, and if we have chosen his day and name, it is because his genius, his work, his character was one of those rare gems produced in the great mine of suffering and flashing backward with all its changing lights […]
obituaries and funeral orations
Voltairine de Cleyre, “Dyer D. Lum” (1893)
DYER D. LUM. BY VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE. DYER D. LUM, poet, philosopher and revolutionist, whose portrait appears as the frontispiece of this number of the Magazine, was born at Geneva, N. Y., February I5, 1839. In these days when the cry of “foreigner” is hurled at every one who dares to form a conception of society without government, it is perhaps worth while to trace the descent of a man so prominent in the extreme radical movement. In the year 1732 Samuel Lum came to this country from Scotland. Daniel Dyer Lum, or, as he afterwards wrote it, Dyer Daniel, […]
obituaries and funeral orations
Voltairine de Cleyre, “In Hora Mortis Nostrae” (1893)
“IN HORA MORTIS NOSTRAE.” ON Wednesday, March 15th, Mrs. Ellen Harker died at Reading, Penna; and with the going out of her breath one of the stanchest and most long-tried friends of liberty of thought and speech went out into the great unknown. Philadelphia Liberals, to whom hers was a familiar figure for so many years, will feel that they have lost one of their central lights, have parted with one of those dear grandmothers of the movement whose white hair and kind smile denied the oft-repeated accusation that there is no veneration or reverence in the worshippers of liberty. […]
obituaries and funeral orations
Voltairine de Cleyre, “Katherine Karg Harker—Obituary” (1896)
MRS. KATHERINE KARG HARKER.—OBITUARY.[note]An address delivered at the funeral of Mrs. Harker and at the grave. Mrs. Harker, who died at the age of seventy years, had been an Atheist for sixty years, and a member of the Philadelphia Liberal Club for the last twenty-five years.[/note] BY VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE. IN the presence of those solemnly closed eyes, these pulseless hands, these voiceless lips I come to speak, as someday I wish that one will speak for me, telling the truth of life and death, The trust of the dead is very sacred. There is but one thing equally so—and […]
obituaries and funeral orations
Obituary for Emile Digeon, hero of the Narbonne Commune
[ezcol_2third] Our Dead EMILE DIGEON Long ago, a young man, who had been a soldier under Digeon at Narbonne, spoke of him in the best possible terms, but I had never seen him, when some years ago—four or five years—I had the occasion to find myself in his company. It was the first and last time—alas!—that I would see him. It was at a meeting, at the Salle de Bretagne, organized, I believe, by the Egalité or the Socialist League founded by that journal. Odin, Zevaco and others were to speak. We were, some friends and I, sitting close to […]