m that night to this I can never
look upon my white bed without seeing afar off the moment when it,
too, will bear the little figure of her I love best in the world,
bound for her voyage to the Minotaur Death; just as I never put off my
clothes at night, and stretch my limbs down among the cool sheets,
without thinking of the night when I shall put off my clothes for the
last time and close my eyes for ever.

LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.

SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really _feel_ and not be morbid? If one
be morbid, one can still be brave.

LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to
think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot
love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere
after death.

SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we _desire_
all things. Who has not cried for the moon in his time? But what is
the use of talking of what we desire? Does life give us all we wish,
however passionately we wish it, and is Death any more likely to
listen to the cry of our desires? Of course we _wish it_, wish it with
a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise
man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we _knew_.

LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of
its probability?--and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been
convinced of its truth.

SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability! O my Lector, what a poor
substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak
of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong
sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking?
Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a _fact_--a fact of
which he has his own personal proof and knowledge--a scientific, not
an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are
naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact, they
are one and all cowardly dreams, a horrible hypocritical clutching at
that which their writers have not the courage to forgo.

LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it
not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for
this dream, as you call it?--for what seems to me this sustaining
faith?

SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy
fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal
p