ear as it passes with new developments of his
nature; with duties accomplished, with work performed. To fill the time
allotted to us to the brim with action and with thought is the only way
in which we can learn to watch its passage with equanimity.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] Monte-Naken.

[75] See _The Mystery of Sleep_, by John Bigelow.

[76] Seneca, _de Brevitate Vitae_, cap. XX.

CHAPTER XVII

'THE END'

It is easy to conceive circumstances not widely different from those of
actual life that would, if not altogether, at least very largely, take
from death the gloom that commonly surrounds it. If all the members of
the human race died either before two or after seventy; if death was in
all cases the swift and painless thing that it is with many; and if the
old man always left behind him children to perpetuate his name, his
memory, and his thoughts, Death, though it might still seem a sad thing,
would certainly not excite the feelings it now so often produces. Of all
the events that befall us, it is that which owes most of its horror not
to itself, but to its accessories, its associations, and to the
imaginations that cluster around it. 'Death,' indeed, as a great stoical
moralist said, 'is the only evil that can never touch us. When we are,
death is not. When death comes, we are not.'

The composition of treatises of consolation intended to accustom men to
contemplate death without terror was one of the favourite exercises of
the philosophers in the Augustan and in the subsequent periods of Pagan
Rome. The chapter which Cicero has devoted to this subject in his
treatise on old age is a beautiful example of how it appeared to a
virtuous pagan, who believed in a future life which would bring him into
communion with those whom he had loved and lost on earth, but who at the
same time recognised this only as a probability, not a certainty.
"Death," he said, 'is an event either utterly to be disregarded if it
extinguish the soul's existence, or much to be wished if it convey her
to some region where she shall continue to exist for ever. One of these
two consequences must necessarily follow the disunion of soul and body;
there is no other possible alternative. What then have I to fear if
after death I shall either not be miserable or shall certainly be
happy?'

Vague notions, however, of a dim, twilight, shadowy world where the
ghosts of the dead lived a faint and joyless existence, and whence they
sometimes retu