LITERALLY WILLING AT HEART

to surrender?  “In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace this life,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “yet in my best meditations do I often desire death.  For a pagan there may be some motive to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma—­that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.”  We are now of the earth; but all the high reason which has taught us to master fire, and water, and the thunderbolts themselves, has also instructed us that we are only sojourners on this little planet.

[Illustration:  THE EVENING OF LIFE]

OUR MINDS ARE AS BROAD

as the range of stellar systems.  We are not as large as a horse or an elephant.  Are we, therefore, inferior?  We are inhabiting bodies which thrive but a few years, on a planet remarkable for its smallness.  But we stretch our knowledge over mighty distances; we construct triangles which have for one side the whole sweep of the earth, over 180 millions of miles; we measure the distance of other worlds by this side of a triangle, and the nearest star is thus found to be 103,000 of our measures away from us—­103,000 times 180,000,000 miles!  Young has well said that

THE UNDEVOUT ASTRONOMER IS MAD.

So did Napoleon die.  Was he not the mightiest man of his time?  Did not the whole world sigh with relief when the final end came?  Yet he was on a tiny rock in the great ocean?  On a map of the world that rock has no title even to a dot.  Yet it would be foolish to say he belonged simply to that rock.  No.  He had come from other human worlds.  He was as broad as the earth.  We, too, have come from other worlds.  We are as broad as the universe.  Even our minds, clad in clay, betray the high character of our souls.

DOES THE BEAST PEER INTO THE STARS?

Do the birds that pass so easily into the air go on voyages of discovery past Sirius?  And yet the air refuses to bear us, and wafts them gently on its lightest zephyrs!  We have sublime faculties—­the fit companions of a soul.  It is not our self-conceit.  The Milky Way is not our conceit.  The eclipses are not our conceit.  The awful sweep of our whole family of planets, moons, and sun, onward in celestial space, is not a conceit.  Therefore we possess our souls, flashing within caskets which have not been altogether unworthy of their priceless treasures.

AS THE CASKET DULLS

and grows to its decay, we cannot weep greatly over its loss, for will it not reveal the splendors all within?

“It is worthy the observing,” says Lord Bacon, “wisest of men,” “that there is no passion in the mind of men so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and, therefore, death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat from him.  Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear pre-occupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho the Emperor had slain himself,