the desperate
attempts made to paraphrase the word which should come naturally to
the lips of all steadfast mortals. "If anything should happen to me,"
says the timid citizen, when he means, "If I should die"; and it would
be possible to collect a score more of roundabout phrases with which
men try to cheat themselves. It is right that we should be in love
with life, for that is the supreme gift; but it is wrong to think with
abhorrence of the close of life, for the same Being who gave us the
thrilling rapture of consciousness bestows the boon of rest upon the
temple of the soul. "He giveth His beloved sleep," and therein He
proves His mighty tenderness.

Strange it is to see how inevitably men and women are drawn to think
and speak of the great Terror when they are forced to muse in
solitude. We flirt with melancholy; we try all kinds of dismal
coquetries to avoid dwelling on our inexorable and beneficent doom;
yet, if we look over the written thoughts of men, we find that more
has been said about Death than even about love. The stone-cold
comforter attracts the poets, and most of them, like Keats, are half
in love with easeful death. The word that causes a shudder when it is
spoken in a drawing-room gives a sombre and satisfying pleasure when
we dwell upon it in our hours of solitude. Sometimes the poets are
palpably guilty of hypocrisy, for they pretend to crave for the
passage into the shades. That is unreal and unhealthy; the wise man
neither longs for death nor dreads it, and the fool who begs for
extinction before the Omnipotent has willed that it should come is a
mere silly blasphemer. But, though the men who put the thoughts of
humanity into musical words are sometimes insincere, they are more
often grave and consoling. I know of two supreme expressions of dread,
and one of these was written by the wisest and calmest man that ever
dwelt beneath the sun. Marvellous it is to think that our most sane
and contented poet should have condensed all the terror of our race
into one long and awful sentence. Perhaps Shakspere was stricken with
momentary pity for the cowardice of his fellows, and, out of pure
compassion, gave their agony a voice. That may be; at any rate, the
fragment of "Measure for Measure" in which the cry of loathing and
fear is uttered stands as the most striking and unforgettable saying
that ever was conceived in the brain of man. Everybody knows the
lines, yet we may once more touch our souls with