“To tell you the truth,” writes one who knew him intimately, “I have never had the feeling that Walt Whitman was dead. I think of him as still there, capable of writing to me at any time, and my thoughts often turn to him for his friendly sympathy.”[777]
It is incredible that any being who has consciously entered upon that life of love which approves itself to the soul as God’s own life, can be fundamentally affected by death. What our life is we know not, nor may we speak with any confidence of the nature of the change which we call death; but love we know, and in it, as Ingersoll rightly guessed, is the key to the riddle of mortality.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[705] Bucke, 53 n.
[706] In re, 111.
[707] Ib., 387.
[708] Ib., 119; Kennedy, 31.
[709] In re, 120; Kennedy, 32.