“I look forward to my dissolution as to a secure haven, where I shall at length find a happy repose from the fatigues of a long voyage.”—(De Senectute)
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:
“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art,
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”
“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;
“The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Has had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar.”
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.