3-070-719 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

A funeral in Norway, 1881. '...in the solemn closing scene of death, and in the customary service of prayer, of consolation and Divine instruction, with which the body was carried to its grave...feelings of...heartfelt awe, and of an eternal hope subduing the passion of natural grief, were sure to be awakened in the hearts of faithful mourners. There is, we are told by those who have visited and familiarly conversed with the people, much of this religious influence still left in operation under the Lutheran Church of Sweden and Norway...The train of men and women and young persons, the family and kinsfolk and neighbourly friends, who appear here slowly walking behind the coffin, which is borne on a sledge, drawn over the snow by one of the farm-horses, on its way to the village church, cannot fail to be impressed with a strong sense of the reality of that most serious lesson, taught by "the one event that happeneth to all." The whole scene bears an aspect of sobered and chastened sadness, enhanced by the stately rows of fir-trees, like the tall shafts in a Gothic Cathedral, forming an avenue on both sides of the road; yet opening in front to the snow-covered slope of the hill, and to a wintry sky from which the cloud has almost cleared away'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.