Not altogether because he must need say something civil.  True, he felt, on the whole, about the future state as Goethe did—­“To the able man this world is not dumb:  why should he ramble off into eternity?  Such incomprehensible subjects lie too far off, and only disturb our thoughts, if made the subject of daily meditation.”  That there was a future state he had no doubt.  Our having been born once, he used to say, is the strongest possible presumption in favour of our being born again; and probably, as nature always works upward and develops higher forms, in some higher state.  Indeed, for aught he knew, the old ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs might be alive now, as lions—­or as men.  He himself, indeed, he had said, ere now, had been probably a pterodactyle of the Lias, neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, but crocodile and bat in one, able alike to swim, or run, or fly, eat anything, and live in any element.  Still it was no concern of his.  He was here; and here was his business.  He had not thought of this life before he came into it; and it would be time enough to think of the next life when he got into it.  Besides, he had all a doctor’s dislike of those terrors of the unseen world, with which some men are wont to oppress still more failing nature, and break the bruised reed.  His business was to cure his patients’ bodies; and if he could not do that, at least to see that life was not shortened in them by nervous depression and anxiety.  Accustomed to see men of every character die under every possible circumstance, he had come to the conclusion that the “safety of a man’s soul” could by no possibility be inferred from his death-bed temper.  The vast majority, good or bad, died in peace:  why not let them die so?  If nature kindly took off the edge of sorrow, by blunting the nervous system, what right had man to interfere with so merciful an arrangement?  Every man, he held in his easy optimism, would go where he ought to go:  and it could be no possible good to him—­indeed, it might be a very bad thing for him, as in this life—­to go where he ought not to go.  So he used to argue, with three-fourths of mankind, mingling truth and falsehood:  and would, on these grounds, have done his best to turn the dissenting preacher out of that house, had he found him in it.  But to-day he was in a more lenient, perhaps in a more human, and therefore more spiritual mood.  It was all very well for him, full of life, and power, and hope, to look on death in that cold, careless way; but for that poor young thing, cut off just as life opened from all that made life lovely—­was not death for her a painful, ugly anomaly?  Could she be blamed, if she shuddered at going forth into the unknown blank, she knew not whither?  All very well for the old emperor of Rome, who had lived his life and done his work, to play with the dreary question—­

  “Animula, vagula, blandula,
  Hospes comesque corporis,
  Quae nunc abibis in loca,
  Rigidula, nudula, pallida?—­”