So to live is heaven;
  To make undying music in the world,

and to have an influence for good result from our lives far down the future.  Through the beneficent influences we can awake in the world

  All our rarer, better, truer self. 
  That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
  That watched to ease the burthen of the world,
     ... shall live till human time
  Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
  Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
  Unread forever.

It was this belief, so satisfying to her and so ardently entertained, which inspired the best and noblest of her poems.  With an almost exultant joy, with the enthusiasm of an old-time devotee, she sings of that immortality which consists in renouncing all which is personal.  The diffusive good which sweetens life for others through all time is the real heaven she sought.

        This is life to come,
  Which martyred men have made more glorious
  For us who strive to follow.  May I reach
  That purest heaven, be to other souls
  The cup of strength in some great agony,
  Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
  Beget the smiles that have no cruelty—­
  Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
  And in diffusion ever more intense. 
  So shall I join the choir invisible
  Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Believing that humanity represents an organic life and development, it was easy for George Eliot to accept the idea of immortality in the race.  She reverenced the voice of truth

  Sent by the invisible choir of all the dead.

It was to her a divine voice, full of tenderness, sympathy and strength.  She was fascinated by this thought of the solemn, ever-present and all-powerful influence of the dead over the living; there was mystery and inspiration in this belief for her.  All phases of religious history, all religious experiences, were by her interpreted in the light of this conception.  The power of Jesus’s life is, that his trancendent beauty of soul lives in the “everlasting memories” of men, and that the cross of his shame has become

                               The sign
  Of death that turned to more diffusive life

His influence, his memory, has lifted up the world with a great effect, and made his life, spirit and ideas an inherent part of humanity.  He has been engrafted into the organic life of the race, and lives there a mighty and an increasing influence.  What has happened in his case happens in the case of all the gifted and great.  According to what they were living they enter into the life of the world for weal or woe.  To become an influence for good in the future, to leave behind an undying impulse of thought and sympathy, was the ambition of George Eliot; and this was all the immortality she desired.