the other is without.  Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt, Syria, and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa, the wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be ill at ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but in a colony like Tasmania, and in any new country where there were no remains of antiquity, no links with the past, the feeling would be very much more poignant, and in some scenes and moods would be like that sense of desolation which assails us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.

He recognizes that he is in a world on which we have but recently entered, and in which our position is not yet assured.

Here, standing on this mound, as on other occasions past counting, I recognize and appreciate the enormous difference which human associations make in the effect produced on us by visible nature.  In this silent solitary place, with the walled field which was once Calleva Atrebatum at my feet, I yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security, never felt in a land that had no historic past.  The knowledge that my individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little while I too must wither and mingle like one of those fallen yellow leaves with the mould, does not grieve me.  I know it and yet disbelieve it; for am I not here alive, where men have inhabited for thousands of years, feeling what I now feel —­their oneness with everlasting nature and the undying human family?  The very soil and wet carpet of moss on which their feet were set, the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow, the rain-drops, the air they breathed, the sunshine in their eyes and hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their very substance and spirit.  Feeling this, death becomes an illusion; and the illusion that the continuous life of the species (its immortality) and the individual life are one and the same is the reality and truth.  An illusion, but, as Mill says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be intolerable.  Happily we are not easily deprived of them, since they are of the nature of instincts and ineradicable.  And this very one which our reason can prove to be the most childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the greatest, the most fruitful of good for the race.  To those who have discarded supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events the foundation to build one on.  For there is no comfort to the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever be interred.  Joy in the “choir invisible” is to him a mere poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which fails to sustain him.  If altruism, or the religion of humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must, like other “soul-growths,” have a deeper, tougher woodier root in our soil.