et of whose power does not lie in the
charm of his or her personality--that is to say, in the wideness of
his or her sympathy with, and therefore life in and communion with
other people? In the wreckage that comes ashore from the sea of
time there is much tinsel stuff that we must preserve and study if
we would know our own times and people; granted that many a dead
charlatan lives long and enters largely and necessarily into our own
lives; we use them and throw them away when we have done with them.
I do not speak of these, I do not speak of the Virgils and Alexander
Popes, and who can say how many more whose names I dare not mention
for fear of offending. They are as stuffed birds or beasts in a
museum; serviceable no doubt from a scientific standpoint, but with
no vivid or vivifying hold upon us. They seem to be alive, but are
not. I am speaking of those who do actually live in us, and move us
to higher achievements though they be long dead, whose life thrusts
out our own and overrides it. I speak of those who draw us ever
more towards them from youth to age, and to think of whom is to feel
at once that we are in the hands of those we love, and whom we would
most wish to resemble. What is the secret of the hold that these
people have upon us? Is it not that while, conventionally speaking,
alive, they most merged their lives in, and were in fullest
communion with those among whom they lived? They found their lives
in losing them. We never love the memory of anyone unless we feel
that he or she was himself or herself a lover.

I have seen it urged, again, in querulous accents, that the so-
called immortality even of the most immortal is not for ever. I see
a passage to this effect in a book that is making a stir as I write.
I will quote it. The writer says:--

"So, it seems to me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of
departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy
life they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to
distant but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore,
speak directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their
tears or laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry,
of which imagination holds the secret. Driven from the market-
place they become first the companions of the student, then the
victims of the specialist. He who would still hold familiar
intercourse with them must train himself to penetrate the veil
which in ever-th