XXI

FROM LIFE TO LIFE

"What means my trembling heart
To be thus shy of death?
My life and I sha'nt part
Though I resign my breath."

Samuel Crossman.

WHILE the longings of some all centre in the thought of the rest to follow on this life's busy day, others are of too active a nature to contemplate with anything like equanimity an even temporary cessation of their energies. With them the attraction lies rather in the thought of the fuller life that death will bring.

Richard Steele describing one such says of him : "He thinks at the time of his birth he entered into an eternal being, and the short article of death he will not allow an interruption of life, since that moment is not of half the duration as is his ordinary sleep."

Browning was equally emphatic in the denial of his own mortality. "Never say of me that I am dead!" he wrote, protesting with almost passionate veheDeath is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive." 'Without death," he insists, "which is our crape-like, church

mence-

yardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life." And he dismisses the contention of death being anything but an adjunct to life as too foolish a one even to argue upon.

People tell you and believe that there is rest in the grave," writes Captain Marryat. "How can that be? The soul is immortal and cannot exist without consciousness. If not conscious, it does not exist; and if conscious, it must work on, . . . and for ever. To assert that there is rest in the grave is denying the immortality of the soul." But surely rest is not inconsistent with life. "Death is the sleeping partner of life," was a pithy saying of Horace Smith.

The gentle Longfellow who, at the age of seventyfour felt himself so full of life that he doubted whether there might not be a mistake in the figures, and that they had somehow got reversed, is just as decided in his repudiation of death as either Marryat or Browning. How many have rested in his calm assertion—

"There is no death! what seems so is transition.

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life elysian,

Whose portal we call Death.”

Again he declares in prose: "Death is neither an end nor a beginning. It is a transition, not from one existence to another, but from one state of existence to another. No link is broken in the chain of being, any more than in passing from infancy to manhood, from manhood to old age."

Tennyson expressed the same thought as his brother-poet across the Atlantic when, writing to a

bereaved mother, he doubts whether he can offer her any solace "except indeed," he says, "by stating my own belief that the son, whom you so loved, is not really what we call dead, but more actually living than when alive here."

Or when, in one of his latest utterances, he declared that Death's truer name is Onward.

To Sir David Brewster, student of light as he was, the idea of from life to life took the form of from light to light. On Sir James Simpson expressing a hope in Sir David's death-hour that he might rally— 'Why, Sir James, should you hope that?" he said with animation. "The machine has worked for above eighty years, and it is worn out. Life has been very bright to me, and now there is the brightness beyond!"

For this exuberance of life is often manifested by those in life's decline. There is a story of a vivacious French octogenarian, one Dacier of Anquetal, who, being informed that his death was imminent, wrote to invite a friend in the strangely-suggestive words, "Come and see a man die, full of life." ["Venez voir un homme qui meurt plein de la vie."]

With a like fulness of life at life's close Victor Hugo wrote, "When I go down to the grave I can say, like so many others, 'I have finished my day's work'; but I cannot say, 'I have finished my life.' My day's work will begin again the next morning. My tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes in the twilight to open in the dawn."

"What have we to do with old

age ? asked

Emerson of Carlyle. "Our existence looks to me, more than ever, initial. We have come to see the ground, and look up materials and tools."

In his essay "Immortality," Emerson had already said: "All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which the great Providence prepares for us, it must be something large and generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to the style of our faculties, of memory, of hope, of imagination, of reason. I have a house, a closet which holds my books, a table, a garden, a field are these, any or all, a reason for refusing the angel who beckons me away, -as if there were no room or skill elsewhere that could reproduce for me as my like or my enlarging wants may require?"

It was the life-loving, laughter-loving Sydney Smith who said that whether we live or die had always seemed to him a matter of infinitely less importance than it does to most people. So vital was his faith in life's persistence.

"Have you not still your soul?"

asks Victor Hugo, comparing life, on this earth, to a bird perched on a frail bough,

"Who feels its branch give way, yet keeps on singing, Knowing it has wings for flight."

Some one meeting the octogenarian ex-President, John Quincy Adams, in the streets of Boston, asked him, "And how is John Quincy Adams to-day?" "John Quincy Adams himself is well, sir; quite well I

thank you," was the dauntless reply. "But the house in which he lives at present is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering upon its foundation. Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well worn out. Its walls are much shattered, and it trembles with every wind. The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable, and I think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is quite well, sir; quite well.”

For the soul is the man, and

"Stab at thee who will,

No stab the soul can kill,'

in the stirring couplet of Sir Walter Raleigh, of which Addison's lines are an echo

"The soul secure in her existence smiles

At the drawn dagger and defies its point."

Or, as Walt Whitman characteristically puts it—

“O, the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend, Nor the bayonet stab what you really are.

The soul, yourself, I see, great as any, good as the best, Waiting secure and content,-which the bullet could never kill,

Nor the bayonet stab, O friend!"1

It was of other warriors that one of Lamb's old dramatists, George Chapman, depicting their heroic bearing, writes, in the bold imagery of the day, that on their brows shone in great letters Pyrrho's saying, "Life and death in all respects are one."

This same reflection it was that brought comfort to the six-year-old Goethe, whose childish faith

"Survivors,"