n of what the inmost
reality of the event is.

The Norse conception of death as a vast, cloudy presence, darkly
sweeping on its victims, and bearing them away wrapped in its
sable folds, is evidently a free product of imagination brooding
not so much on the distinct phenomena of an individual case as on
the melancholy mystery of the disappearance of men from the
familiar places that knew them once but miss them now. In a
somewhat kindred manner, the startling magnificence of the sketch
in the Apocalypse, of death on the pale horse, is a product of
pure imagination meditating on the wholesale slaughter which was
to deluge the earth when God's avenging judgments fell upon the
enemies of the Christians. But to consider this murderous warrior
on his white charger as literally death, would be as erroneous as
to imagine the bare armed executioner and the guillotine to be
themselves the death which they inflict. No more appalling picture
of death has been drawn than that by Milton, whose dire image has
this stroke of truth in it, that its adumbrate formlessness
typifies the disorganizing force which reduces all cunningly built
bodies of life to the elemental wastes of being. The incestuous
and mistreated progeny of Sin is thus delineated:

"The shape,
If shape it might be call'd that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either, black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart: what seem'd his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on."

But the most common personification of death is as a skeleton
brandishing a dart; and then he is called the grisly king of
terrors; and people tremble at the thought of him, as children do
at the name of a bugbear in the dark. What sophistry this is! It
is as if we should identify the trophy with the conqueror, the
vestiges left in the track of a traveller with the traveller
himself. Death literally makes a skeleton of man; so man
metaphorically makes a skeleton of Death! All these
representations of death, however beautiful, or pathetic, or
horrible, are based on superficial appearances, misleading
analogies, arbitrary fancies, perturbed sensibilities, not on a
firm hold of realities, insight of truth, and philosophical
analysis. They are all to be brushed aside as phantoms of
nightmare or artificial creations of fiction. Poetry has mostly
rested, hitherto,