This is from Myers’ Poems, 1870, and is one of a pair of sonnets. I do not quote the first in full because its meaning seems obscure, but the last six lines on the shortness of life as compared with eternity are as follow:
Lo, all that age is as a speck of sand
Lost on the long beach where the tides are free,
And no man metes it in his hollow hand
Nor cares to ponder it, how small it be;
At ebb it lies forgotten on the land
And at full tide forgotten in the sea.
In the second sonnet quoted above, Myers is not merely referring to the Biblical account of the future life in heaven as consisting in endless worship—which, if taken literally instead of symbolically, would certainly mean a “drear eternity.” The suggestion is that there must be some equivalent to work, thought, activity, progress, and definite aims to make eternal life preferable to annihilation. (I am reminded here of a curious statement made by the great Adam Smith, “What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience!”) Myers ultimately came to the definite conclusion that the future life will be one of continued progress.
His name, Myers, is purely English, not Jewish. This gifted man was not only a fine poet, but also an important essayist and a remarkable classical scholar. He, Hodgson, and others formed the small band of able men who threw everything else aside and devoted their lives to Psychical Research. Myers’ best poems appeared in The Renewal of Youth and other Poems, 1882, and it was no doubt a loss to poetry that during the remaining eighteen years of his life he added little, if anything, more. However, he and Hodgson considered that the work to which they had devoted themselves was of the very highest importance. Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, the important work in which Myers embodied his conclusions, was left incomplete at his death, but Hodgson, with Miss Alice Johnson’s assistance, completed and edited it.