a
boon which thoughtless myriads would clasp with frantic triumph
would prove, perhaps, a still more fearful curse than if
distributed over the whole species.

Retaining his human affections, how excruciating and remediless
his grief must be, to be so cut off from all equal community of
experience and destiny with mankind, to see all whom he loves,
generation after generation, fading away, leaving him alone, to
form new ties again to be dissolved, to watch his beloved ones
growing old and infirm, while he stands without a change! His love
would be left, in agony of melancholy grandeur, "a solitary angel
hovering over a universe of tombs" on the tremulous wings of
memory and grief, those wings incapacitated, by his madly coveted
prerogative of deathlessness, ever to move from above the sad rows
of funereal urns. Zanoni, in Bulwer's magnificent conception, says
to Viola, "The flower gives perfume to the rock on whose breast it
grows. A little while, and the flower is dead; but the rock still
endures, the snow at its breast, the sunshine on its summit." A
deathless individual in a world of the dying, joined with them by
ever bereaved affections, would be the wretchedest creature
conceivable. As no man ever yet prayed for any thing he would pray
to be released, to embrace dear objects in his arms and float away
with them to heaven, or even to lie down with them in the kind
embrace of mother earth. And if he had no affections, but lived a
stoic existence, exempt from every sympathy, in impassive
solitude, he could not be happy, he would not be man: he must be
an intellectual marble of thought or a monumental mystery of woe.

Death, therefore, is benignity. When men wish there were no such
appointed event, they are deceived, and know not what they wish.
Literature furnishes a strange and profound, though wholly
unintentional, confirmation of this view. Every form in which
literary genius has set forth the conception of an earthly
immortality represents it as an evil. This is true even down to
Swift's painful account of the Struldbrugs in the island of
Laputa. The legend of the Wandering Jew,16 one of the most
marvellous products of the human mind in imaginative literature,
is terrific with its blazoned revelation of the contents of an
endless life on earth. This story has been embodied, with great
variety of form and motive, in more than a hundred works. Every
one is, without the writer's intention, a disguised sermon of