and life? If men would only be content to let
their minds play freely around all the facts that
concern our entrance, our progress, our exit, then
existence would be relieved from the presence of terror.
The Greeks were more rational than we are; they took
the joys of life with serenity and gladness, and they
accepted the mighty transformation with the same serenity.
On their memorial-stones there is no note of mourning.
A young man calmly bids adieu to his friends and prepares
to pass with dignity from their presence; a gallant
horseman exults in the knowledge that he once rejoiced
in life—“Great joy had I on earth,
and now I that came from the earth return to the earth.”
Such are the carvings and inscriptions that show the
wise, brave spirit of the ancients. But we, with
our civilisation, behave somewhat like those Indian
tribes who keep one mysterious word in their minds,
and try to avoid mentioning it throughout their lives.
Even in familiar conversation it is amusing to hear
the desperate attempts made to paraphrase the word
which should come naturally to the lips of all steadfast
mortals. “If anything should happen to me,”
says the timid citizen, when he means, “If I
should die”; and it would be possible to collect
a score more of roundabout phrases with which men
try to cheat themselves. It is right that we should
be in love with life, for that is the supreme gift;
but it is wrong to think with abhorrence of the close
of life, for the same Being who gave us the thrilling
rapture of consciousness bestows the boon of rest upon
the temple of the soul. “He giveth His
beloved sleep,” and therein He proves His mighty
tenderness.
Strange it is to see how inevitably men and women
are drawn to think and speak of the great Terror when
they are forced to muse in solitude. We flirt
with melancholy; we try all kinds of dismal coquetries
to avoid dwelling on our inexorable and beneficent
doom; yet, if we look over the written thoughts of
men, we find that more has been said about Death than
even about love. The stone-cold comforter attracts
the poets, and most of them, like Keats, are half
in love with easeful death. The word that causes
a shudder when it is spoken in a drawing-room gives
a sombre and satisfying pleasure when we dwell upon
it in our hours of solitude. Sometimes the poets
are palpably guilty of hypocrisy, for they pretend
to crave for the passage into the shades. That
is unreal and unhealthy; the wise man neither longs
for death nor dreads it, and the fool who begs for
extinction before the Omnipotent has willed that it
should come is a mere silly blasphemer. But,
though the men who put the thoughts of humanity into
musical words are sometimes insincere, they are more
often grave and consoling. I know of two supreme
expressions of dread, and one of these was written
by the wisest and calmest man that ever dwelt beneath
the sun. Marvellous it is to think that our most
sane and contented poet should have condensed all