opopoeia of life is anywhere to be found. With the Greeks,
Thanatos was a god; with the Romans, Mors was a goddess: but no
statue was ever moulded, no altar ever raised, to Zoe or Vita. At
first thought, we should anticipate the reverse of this; but, in
truth, the fact is quite naturally as it is. Life is a continuous
process; and any one who makes the effort will find how difficult
it is to conceive of it as an individual being, with distinctive
attributes, functions, and will. It is an inward possession which
we familiarly experience, and in the quiet routine of custom we
feel no shock of surprise at it, no impulse to give it imaginative
shape and ornament. On the contrary, death is an impending
occurrence, something which we anticipate and shudder at,
something advancing toward us in time to strike or seize us. Its
externality to our living experience, its threatening approach,
the mystery and alarm enwrapping it, are provocative conditions
for fanciful treatment, making personifications inevitable.

With the Old Aryan race of India, death is Yama, the soul of the
first man, departed to be the king of the subterranean realm of
the subsequent dead, and returning to call after him each of his
descendants in turn. To the good he is mild and lovely, but to the
impious he is clad in terror and acts with severity. The purely
fanciful character of this thought is obvious; for, according to
it, death was before death, since Yama himself died. Yama does not
really represent death, but its arbiter and messenger. He is the
ruler over the dead, who himself carries the summons to each
mortal to become his subject.

In the Hebrew conception, death was a majestic angel, named
Sammael, standing in the court of heaven, and flying thence over
the earth, armed with a sword, to obey the behests of God. The
Talmudists developed and dressed up the thought with many details,
half sublime, half fantastic. He strides through the world at a
step. From the soles of his feet to his shoulders he is full of
eyes. Every person in the moment of dying sees him; and at the
sight the soul retreats, running through all the limbs, as if
asking permission to depart from them. From his naked sword fall
three drops: one pales the countenance, one destroys the vitality,
one causes the body to decay. Some Rabbins say he bears a cup from
which the dying one drinks, or that he lets fall from the point of
his sword a single acrid drop upon the sufferer's ton