Stretton by Henry Kingsley

His death was very sudden. The nurse had heard the very slightest movement in his bed, and coming to him had found him quite dead. When the house was still as death itself, Roland went all alone and looked on death for the first time. It had the effect it usually has; it saddened and ennobled him.

In older, wilder times, the sight of death was nothing; it is but little now in war. But in our carefully guarded domestic life, the sight of death, still more the first sight of death, has its full value. To appreciate, for the first time, the great fact of all, that some day or another the body most familiar to us will be stiff and cold, and never move again, but perish into the earth, is an era in a man's life. To recognise for the first time the inevitable; to feel that the face can never smile more which laughed at our jest but yesterday; to realise the wonderful change of all changes, makes most men think for a time. The feeling goes off after a few times, but the first time generally has its full effect. On Roland, full of strange schemes in that little-uttering head of his, it had actually more than its proper effect,