All or nothing!  And what other meaning can the Shakespearean “To be or not to be” have, or that passage in Coriolanus where it is said of Marcius “He wants nothing of a god but eternity”?  Eternity, eternity!—­that is the supreme desire!  The thirst of eternity is what is called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize himself in him.  Nothing is real that is not eternal.

From the poets of all ages and from the depths of their souls this tremendous vision of the flowing away of life like water has wrung bitter cries—­from Pindar’s “dream of a shadow,” skias onar, to Calderon’s “life is a dream” and Shakespeare’s “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” this last a yet more tragic sentence than Calderon’s, for whereas the Castilian only declares that our life is a dream, but not that we ourselves are the dreamers of it, the Englishman makes us ourselves a dream, a dream that dreams.

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry.  And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate.  The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.  In appearance at any rate, for in reality....  And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.

Everything passes!  Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to be for ever! to be God!

“Ye shall be as gods!” we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5).  “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable,” wrote the Apostle (1 Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of the dead—­that is to say, from the cult of immortality.

The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty.  This thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is the very palpitation of my consciousness.  When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, “Thou shalt cease to be!” the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my spirit with the blood of divinity.