Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/338

312 may indeed be accounted, in the severity of its application, as a forecast of the examination of our fardels of that bourne from which no traveller returns. It is there that all preparation ends, whether in the old way of a duty done, or an injunction fulfilled, or in the formless helplessness of those who have come no certain road, and have arrived travel-stained and broken, with every manner of disreputable-looking box and bundle. The new and unimaginable beginning that lies beyond that ending is not the beginning of another preparation, unless all the seers and diviners have been mistaken in their conjectures. There, all is fulfilment of one kind or another; things are done, or at least doing. It is a state of results, of eventualities in which there will be no more of preparation. It seems, from our present point of view, ideal, and yet we may not like it so much as we expect. Whether we do or not will depend a good deal, it is said, upon what sort of baggage we have arrived with; or possibly it may depend upon the laxity or strictness with which our baggage is examined. Some of the theorists hold that an English liberality will be practised in the construction of the law; that a piece or two of one's moral luggage will be looked into, and then passed with the rest as of no compromising character. Others contend that the American customs method will be applied. First the new arrival will be severely questioned as to what he has in those bundles and boxes of his. Then, upon his answer, candid or uncandid, the visitation of his baggage will begin. It is said that there will be nothing like "wearing things in." That charity for one's self with which one hopes to cover a multitude of one's sins, will be lifted as a mantle from one's shoulders, and the hidden things will be revealed. There will be nothing like passing a bank-note to the inspector, and hoping for an assumed carelessness on his part; he is strictly forbidden to accept gratuities; and with what anxiety shall not one watch him as he goes through some apparently innocent valise in which one's pet peccadillos have been packed away! What shame and anguish as he brings them out, one after another, and lays them on the wharf, plain to the gaze of the bystanders, and then gathers them up and leads one away to the assessor to have them valued, and the duty levied upon them!

More probably the sum exacted will not be so great as used to be thought. It will not bankrupt the arriving traveller, and when he has paid it he will experience the relief which is said to follow the sufferance of any just penalty. In such matters we have to take the general supposition; personally we know nothing about it. But what we feel pretty sure of is that he will then be freed forever from the stress of preparation. There can be no getting ready for something beyond. Eternity will have at least this advantage over time that there can be no fear of not being ready at a given moment for a different thing. Change will have ceased, and with this disappearance of variety in the objects of existence the curse of choice will be lifted. It is no longer a question of going anywhere else; you have come to stay.

There are those who contend that this in the end—there will really be no end, of course, but we have to speak after the manner of this world—will be rather tiresome, or that the alleviations of the monotony have not yet been attractively imagined. Upon this point we cannot answer with authority; but we have a notion that eternity will pass much more swiftly than most people suppose, for the very reason that there can be no change in it. The days that are very like one another, as any one knows who has passed them in an imprisoning sickness, vanish rapidly. The same phenomenon has been noted in the years of later life. As long as one is young, the years are packed with novel experiences, and they move in a slow procession under the burden. But afterwards, when all experience is repetition, and the thing which is now is the thing which has been, then the years bestir themselves and get lightly, if not gayly, forward. It will perhaps be so with the æons of eternity; it is quite imaginable. At any rate, there will be never again that weariness of preparation for something different that makes the thing when we get it seem not worth the pains of striving for it.