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And what was always true of all the dead is far more true to-day when only the best are chosen for the tomb.  In the region which we believe to be under the earth, which we call the kingdom of the shades and which in reality is the ethereal region and the kingdom of light, there are at this moment perturbations no less profound than those which we are experiencing on the surface of our earth.  The young dead are invading it from every side; and since the beginning of this world they have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal.  Whereas in the customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who leave us receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in this incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles’ expression, “has not departed from life at the height of glory.”  Not one of them but has gone up, not down, to his death clad in the greatest sacrifice that man can make for an idea which cannot die.  All that we have hitherto believed, all that we have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all that has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all that has overcome the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature:  all this could have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as these, such a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had really forever disappeared, were forever useless and voiceless, forever without influence in a world to which they have given life.

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It is hardly possible that this could be so as regards the external survival of the dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is not so as regards their survival in ourselves.  Here nothing is lost and no one perishes.  Our memories are to-day peopled by a multitude of heroes struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the sick and the aged, who already had ceased to exist before leaving the earth.  We must tell ourselves that now, in each of our homes, both in our cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead man in the glory of his strength.  He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour of which it had never ventured to dream.  His constant presence, imperious and inevitable, diffuses through it and maintains a religion and ideas which it had never known there before, hallows everything around it, forces the eyes to look higher and the spirit to refrain from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the speech that is held and the thoughts that are mustered there and, little by little, ennobles and uplifts a whole people on a scale of unexampled vastness.

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