"A few more years shall roll,
A few more seasons come,
And we shall be with those that rest
Asleep within the tomb.
"A few more struggles here,
A few more partings o'er,
A few more toils, a few more tears,
And we shall weep no more."
By no one has this, however, been more grandly expressed than by Shelley.
"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
He has outsoared the shadows of our night.
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray, in vain—"
Most men, however, decline to believe that
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep." [6]
According to the more general view death frees the soul from the encumbrance of the spirit, and summons us to the seat of judgment. In fact,
"There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death." [7]
We have bodies, "we are spirits." "I am a soul," said Epictetus, "dragging about a corpse." The body is the mere perishable form of the immortal essence. Plato concluded that if the ways of God are to be justified, there must be a future life.
To the aged in either case death is a release. The Bible dwells most forcibly on the blessing of peace. "My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you." Heaven is described as a place where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.