class="i0">With songs in praise of death, and crowned with flowers.”

No doubt Tennyson was to a very great extent able to stay himself on the personal mystic experiences described in his poem The Ancient Sage—experiences which gave him a subjective assurance that death was “a ludicrous impossibility”. Browning, characteristically buoyant, was ready to face death with a laugh; the fog in the throat will pass, the black minute’s at end, then thy breast. In Prospice we feel the eager sureness with which he looked forward to rejoining her whose bodily presence had left him a few months before. But even Browning’s cheery salutation is outdone by Whitman. The American, though acquainted with suffering as Browning was not, and though apparently without much belief or interest in personal survival, was almost uncannily friendly to his own taking off. And it was not because he suffered so greatly that he hailed release. It was more the natural outcome of his joyous temperament, subdued at the last to a kind of solemn exaltation. The following stanzas were written with George Inness’ picture The Valley of the Shadow of Death in mind:

This is indeed a change from the idea of Death as King of Terrors, as “spectre feared of man”. (In Memoriam)

The Greek idea, at its best, seems to have been half-way between the two extremes. It regarded death with more or less equanimity, as being certainly not the greatest evil—no king of terrors—but merely an emissary of greater Powers, to whose will we must bow, though with dignity:

Sophocles has the same thought, with an added touch of Hamlet-like irritation about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune:

Cicero voices the same pagan feeling, in the contented language of a rather tired, wise old man:

And was it not Cato—fine old Stoic—who, finding his natural force abating, and accepting the hint furnished by a stumble in the street, stooped and kissed the ground: “Proserpine, I come!” and went home, making a speedy end, unwilling to suffer the indignity of disease and the shame of being served in weakness? Modern opinion wisely reprobates suicide, but there is something noble in the Roman attitude, condemn it as we will. As a modern and almost comic example of a modern Stoic’s attitude to this same question of death we may cite the famous lines of Walter Savage Landor:

“Strove with none”, indeed! As a matter of fact, Landor strove with everybody. He was one of the most quarrelsome men that ever lived. The only man who could tolerate him was Browning. But in his mellower moments, at least, he was “ready to depart”, quietly acquiescing in the scheme of things. To depart, note; not to be extinguished. And this view is, all things considered, the most sane and wholesome view of the great problem of Death. We did not begin to live when we were born in this present tenement of flesh; we shall not cease to live when we quit it. ’Tis but a tent for a night, an interlude, a descent into matter, a temporary incarnation for educative purposes, of the soul or a part of it, as it pursues its lone way towards the ineffable goal. This life is but a sleep and a forgetting;

Death, then, is to be welcomed when it comes. We must not run to meet it, or run from it; but we should welcome it when God thinks fit to send it, His messenger. The beautiful eternal right hand beckons, and the soul gladly arises and departs, to “that imperial palace whence it came”, or to fare forth on some “adventure brave and new”.

IF A MAN DIE,
SHALL HE LIVE AGAIN?

A friend of mine tells me that psychical articles are always interesting, “because so many people die and go somewhere”. Presumably, those who remain here feel a natural curiosity as to where the departed have gone, partly for the latter’s sake, and partly because they themselves would like to know, so that they will know what to expect when their own time comes.

The teaching of religion on this point is admittedly either rather vague, or, if definite—as with the Augustinian theology—no longer credible. We have