e,
As step after step the victim thither where its slayers wait.'

Friends and kinsmen--they must all be surrendered! Is it not said--

'Like as a plank of drift-wood
Tossed on the watery main,
Another plank encountered,
Meets--touches--parts again;
So tossed, and drifting ever,
On life's unresting sea,
Men meet, and greet, and sever,
Parting eternally.'

Thou knowest these things, let thy wisdom chide thy sorrow, saying--

'Halt, traveller! rest i' the shade: then up and leave it!
Stay, Soul! take fill of love; nor losing, grieve it!'

But in sooth a wise man would better avoid love; for--

'Each beloved object born
Sets within the heart a thorn,
Bleeding, when they be uptorn.'

And it is well asked--

'When thine own house, this rotting frame, doth wither,
Thinking another's lasting--goest thou thither?'

What will be, will be; and who knows not--

'Meeting makes a parting sure,
Life is nothing but death's door.'

For truly--

'As the downward-running rivers never turn and never stay,
So the days and nights stream deathward, bearing human lives away.'

And though it be objected that--

'Bethinking him of darkness grim, and death's unshunned pain,
A man strong-souled relaxes hold, like leather soaked in rain.'

Yet is this none the less assured, that--

'From the day, the hour, the minute,
Each life quickens in the womb;
Thence its march, no falter in it,
Goes straight forward to the tomb.'

Form, good friend, a true idea of mundane matters; and bethink thee that
regret is after all but an illusion, an ignorance--

'An 'twere not so, would sorrow cease with years?
Wisdom sees aright what want of knowledge fears.'

'Kaundinya listened to all this with the air of a dreamer. Then rising
up he said, 'Enough! the house is hell to me--I will betake me to the
forest.'

'Will that stead you?' asked Kapila; 'nay--

'Seek not the wild, sad heart! thy passions haunt it;
Play hermit in thine house with heart undaunted;
A governed heart, thinking no thought but good,
Makes crowded houses holy solitude.'

To be master of one's self--to eat only to prolong life--to yield to
love no more than may suffice to perpetuate a family--and never to speak
but in the cause of truth, this,' said Kapila, 'is armor against grief.
What wouldst thou with a hermit's life--prayer