or violation of her laws, find themselves in a sea of troubles."
For Nature herself, to the man who will work in harmony with her,
affords the means of alleviation, of restoration even--who knows if not
of something better still?--the means, that is, of encountering the
ills that result from the breach of her own laws; and the best the man
who would help his fellows can do, is to search after and find such
other laws, whose applied operation will restore the general conduction,
and render life after all an endurable, if not a desirable thing."

"But you can do nothing with death," said Juliet.

"Nothing--yet--alas!"

"Is death a law, or a breach of law, then?" she asked.

"That is a question I can not answer."

"In any case, were it not better to let the race die out, instead of
laboriously piecing and patching at a too old garment, and so leave room
for a new race to come up, which the fruit of experience, both sweet and
bitter, left behind in books, might enable to avoid like ruin?"

"Ages before they were able to read our books, they would have broken
the same laws, found the same evils, and be as far as we are now beyond
the help of foregone experiences: they would have the experience itself,
of whose essence it is, that it is still too late."

"Then would not the kindest thing be to poison the race--as men on the
prairies meet fire with fire--and so with death foil Death and have done
with dying?"

"It seems to me better to live on in the hope that someone may yet--in
some far-off age it may only be, but what a thing if it should
be!--discover the law of death, learn how to meet it, and, with its
fore-runners, disease and decay, banish it from the world. Would you
crush the dragonfly, the moth, or the bee, because its days are so few?
Rather would you not pitifully rescue them, that they might enjoy to
their natural end the wild intoxication of being?"

"Ah, but they are happy while they live!"

"So also are men--all men--for parts of their time. How many, do you
think, would thank me for the offered poison?"

Talk after talk of this kind, which the scope of my history forbids me
to follow, took place between them, until at length Juliet, generally
silenced, came to be silenced not unwillingly. All the time, their
common humanity, each perceiving that the other had suffered, was urging
to mutual consolation. And all the time, that mysterious force,
inscrutable as creation itself, which draws the indivi