Are lost like that daylight, for ’tis not their home.
There is a lone pilgrim, before whose faint eyes
The water he pants for but sparkles and flies—
Who may that pilgrim be?
’Tis man, hapless man, through this life tempted on
By fair shining hopes, that in shining are gone.”
In that essay of John Foster’s, from which a citation has already been made, the essayist protests against the care so many popular writers seem to take to guard against the inroad of ideas pertaining to another life—as much care as the inhabitants of Holland take against the irruption of the sea; and their writings, he adds, do really form a kind of moral dyke against the invasion from the other world. “They do not instruct a man to act, to enjoy, and to suffer, as a being that may by to-morrow have finally abandoned this orb; everything is done to beguile the feeling of his being ‘a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.’” They fail to recognise the c’est vrai of the Christian lyrist’s avowal, the—
“’Tis true, we are but strangers
And sojourners below;
And countless snares and dangers