Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/236

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Oh, never blows the rose so red

As where some buried Caesar lies;

and another, the beautiful lines of Nash:

Worms feed on Hector brave,

Dust hath closed Helen's eyes.

But to my mind came some words said to me by Algernon Blackwood the first day we met:

"You know we all came out of the earth; somehow or other we have got to get back to her. The Earth is not dead, she is living."

He was right. And the dead under the earth are in living care. All that is is One and is beautiful. Life and death make a unity. Everything in the world and without it, in the past and in the future, is to me a unity, and I am calm and happy in it. In me, in you, are all the dead—they crowd behind my eyes and look out, one above another's shoulders like the people at a great spectacle. There are myriads of them—I hold them. In this sense they are under the earth, in that you and I are earth, and they are in us, and look out of us. We are all windows through which there glance at times faces of each of all there ever have been.