Exult and cry, and search the inmost deep
  Where the dark sources of new passion sleep.

Jubal passes to other lands to teach them the gift of song, but at last returns an old man to share in the affections of his people.  He finds them celebrating with great pomp the invention of music, but they will not accept him as the Jubal they did honor to and believed dead.  Then the voice of his own past instructs him that he should not expect any praises or glory in his own person; it is enough to live in the joy of a world uplifted by music.  Thus instructed, his broken life succumbs.

  Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave,
  The All-creating Presence for his grave.

In this poem George Eliot regards death as a means of drawing men into a deeper and truer sympathy with each other.  The same thought is more fully presented when she exultingly sings,—­

  O may I join the choir invisible
  Of those immortal dead who live again
  In minds made better by their presence:  live
  In pulses stirred to generosity,
  In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
  For miserable aims that end with self. 
  In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
  And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
  To vaster issues.

Death teaches us to forget self, to live for others, to pour out unstinted sympathy and affection for those whose lives are short and difficult.  It is the same thought as that given in reply to Young; mortal sorrows and pains should move us as hopes of immortality cannot.  There accompanies this idea the larger one, that our future life is to be found in the better life we make for those who come after us.  George Eliot believed with Comte, that we are to live again in minds made better by what we have done and been, that an influence goes out from every helpful and good life which makes the lives of those who come after us fairer and grander.

She rests this belief on no sentimental or ideal grounds.  Its justification is to be found in science, in the law of hereditary transmission.  Darwin and Spencer base the great world-process of evolution on the two laws of transmission and variation.  The fittest survives, and the world advances.  The survival of every fit and positive form of life in the better forms which succeed it is in accordance with a process or a law which holds true up into all the highest and subtlest expressions of man’s inner life.  Heredity is as true morally and spiritually as physically, and our moral and spiritual offspring will partake of our own qualities; and, standing on the vantage ground of our lives, will rise higher than we.  What George Eliot regards as the positive teaching of science becomes also an inspiring religious belief to her.

George Eliot accepted the belief of an immortality in the race with a deep and earnest conviction.  It gave a great impulse to her life, it satisfied her craving for closer harmony and sympathy with her fellows, it satisfied her longing for the power to assuage sorrow and to comfort pain.