His are

millions of years' " is the span of human life. as different from the shallow, unreal hopes with which some are able to content themselves as the void Nirvana is from Paradise. How inspiriting are his hearty assurances of immortality! To the misgivings that occasionally assail him, again and again he returns victorious answer—

"Did you think life was so well provided for, and Death, the purport of all life, is not well provided for ?”

Amid what to others might seem the most appalling, most annihilating discoveries in science, he moves familiarly as in his old paternal homestead, and finds in them the wholesomest nutriment for his dreams of universal joy and immortality.

And Whitman's belief was no vague theory reserved for imaginative moods. He subjected it to the most crucial tests. In the midst of the conflicting emotions roused in him by the news of the death of Carlyle, whose personality had powerfully impressed him, "And now that he has gone hence," he asks, "can it be that Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically dissolve in ashes and by winds, remains an identity still? In ways, perhaps, eluding all the statements, lore, and speculations of ten thousand years-eluding all possible statements to mortal sense-does he yet exist, a definite, vital being, a spirit, an individual? . . . I have no doubt of it."

There is something that appeals to the imagination in this contemplation of one old man's death by another already in the twilight of his day. Whitman died about ten years later, chanting to the last, in

those barbaric strains of his, his songs of welcome to death, "lovely and soothing death," the solver and reconciler of all.

At the poet's own graveside in Camden, New Jersey, his friends abundantly testified to his "positive belief in immortality," which with him, said one, was not a hope or a beautiful dream. He believed that we all live in an eternal universe, and that man is as indestructible as his Creator."

Of Carlyle himself the testimony is not so clear, though at least he was always on the side of hope. Writing on Goethe he exclaims-"What then is man? He endures but for an hour, and is crushed before the moth. Yet in the being and in the working of a faithful man is there already (as all faith, from the beginning, gives assurance) a something that pertains not to this wild death-element of Time; that triumphs over Time, and is, and will be, when Time shall be no more."

And in a letter to John Sterling he quotes Goethe's lines

"The mason's ways are

A type of existence,
And his persistence
Is as the days are
Of men in this world.

The future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow;
We press still thorough,
Naught that abides in it
Daunting us, onward.

And solemn before us
Veiled the dark Portal,
Goal of all mortal;
Stars silent rest o'er us,
Graves under us silent.

While earnest thou gazest,
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error,
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.

But heard are the voices,
Heard are the sage's,
The world's, and the age's.
Choose well your choice is
Brief and yet endless.

Here eyes do regard you
In eternity's stillness,
Here is all fulness,

Ye brave, to reward you.
Work and despair not."

"Is not that a piece of psalmody?" concludes Carlyle. "It seems to me like a piece of marching music to the great brave Teutonic kindred as they march through the waste of Time-that section of eternity they were appointed for. Oben die Sterne und unten die Gräber, &c. Let us all sing it and march on cheerful of heart.

'We bid you to hope.'

So say the voices, do they not?"

The poem was quoted by Carlyle in the original, Froude substituting for it Carlyle's own translation. It was, writes Froude, "on Carlyle's lips to the last days of his life. When very near the end he quoted the last lines of it to me when speaking of what might lie beyond. 'We bid you to hope.'

There was another poem, received by Carlyle in a note from Lockhart (its author) which, likewise, Froude tells us, was often on Carlyle's lips in those

I "Wir heissen euch hoffen."

last lonely days, and which has a more personal note of hope than Goethe's :—

"It is an old belief

That on some solemn shore,

Beyond the sphere of grief,

Dear friends shall meet once more :

Beyond the sphere of time,
And sin, and fate's control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of body and of soul.

That creed I fain would keep,
This hope I'll not forego;
Eternal be the sleep

If not to waken so."

Many years before, Carlyle had written to his wife, on the death of her aunt: "Surely, surely, there is a life beyond death, and that gloomy portal leads to a purer and an abiding mansion?" And later, on the far more grievous loss of her mother: "Patience, my darling! She has gone whither we are swiftly following her. Perhaps essentially she is still near us. Near and far do not belong to that eternal world which is not of space and time. God rules that too; we know nothing more."

Tennyson splendidly carried on the tradition of "the voices." Had we only "In Memoriam," it would be enough to prove his faith in the survival of the individual. But the thought of immortality was the dominant note of his life as of his poetry. To him, in his own words, "annihilation was impossible and inconceivable." Mr. Wilfred Ward,

I Professor Knight: Blackwood's Magazine, August, 1897.

in the New Review (July, 1896) quotes him as follows:

"Lushington used to say to me that if there were no other world, this world would be all the more valuable. I, on the contrary, feel that it is only the light shed on our earth from another world which gives it any value."

To Lord Houghton, on the death of Lady Houghton, in a letter given in Sir Weymss Reid's "Life of Lord Houghton" he writes: "I may say that I think I can see, as far as one can see in this twilight, that the nobler nature does not pass from its individuality when it passes out of this one life.”

And, in the Nineteenth Century (January, 1893) Mr. Knowles gives the following testimony: "He [Tennyson] formulated once and quite deliberately his own religious creed in these words' There's a something that watches over us; and our individuality endures: that's my faith, and that's all my faith.'” A faith that, in his poems, rises to something higher, and of a far more personal intensity.

The Queen bears testimony to her laureate's faith in a touching passage in her private journal (1883):— "After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where there would be no partings; and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you