Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/329

312 graveyard, in which corpses upon corpses are still accumulating. God is alone; He only lives among the dying….

"Our life owes its poor semblance of duration simply to the circumstance, that we include the past in our calculation of the present; but it shrivels up into a tiny moment, if we place it by the side of an immeasurable future, which flows towards us in a broad stream, but every drop of which is absorbed as soon as it touches us; a life between the contending tides of two oceans of eternity, which by meeting can make each other neither larger nor smaller.

"Imagine, then, that, instead of sixty years, we should live only sixty seconds,—and, properly speaking, in the face of a boundless eternity, we do not live longer, no, nor even so long, —what matters it what such a minute-creature may think, and desire, and aim at, for half a minute, in order to transmit and perpetuate its seed and crop in another minute-creature? What value has the civilization and illumination of a people whose existence is reckoned by seconds, of a little heap of pulverized colophony, which blazes and shines while it is blown through the flame of life? And can the dead pseudo-immortality of libraries and museums, which resides and is reflected in the transient blaze of the quickly consumed witch-meal, give warmth and soul to a life exposed to an eternal extinction often before its short seconds are lived out and fulfilled? If the continual admixture and influx of the rising generation into that which is fading away, were not to impart to the latter a solid appearance of duration and continuity, turning it into a kind of electric jar of knowledge; if, without mixing with the next, the element of its renovation, each generation was in its turn to sink down like a swarm of day-flies from the beams of the evening sun into the water, all the brilliancy and splendour of the nations would appear to us only as the vanishing of glow-worms, which through the night describe their small orbit over the earth. Then must each individual, in the midst of his flight and effort to ennoble himself and others, be cast down by the thought that the injury done him by any chance gust of wind, may at any moment cause the tombstone to descend like a portcullis upon all his endeavours….

"If from dying nations we pass on to dying individuals, it is painful to the soul thoroughly to realize, even for a moment, love between those that are to perish. From perpetual nothingness a couple of men wake up on their death-beds, and from these they look at each other with eyes full of deepest love, and instantly, after a few minutes, they close those eyes again in eternal annihilation; —and is that the imperishable love of men towards one another, —of parents, children, spouses, and friends? Without immortality, you cannot say to any one, 'I love thee;' you can only sigh and say, 'I would love.'

"The heart stands lonely upon the earth, till at last it ceases to be lonely