For the soul’s fierce cry for immortality is this, — only this: — Return to me after death the thing as it was before. Leave me in the Hereafter the being I am to-day. Rob me of the thoughts, the feelings, the desires that are my life, and you have left nothing to take. Your immortality is annihilation, your Hereafter is a lie.

Waldo flung open the door, and walked out into the starlight, his pain-stricken thoughts ever driving him on as he paced there.

“There must be a Hereafter because man longs for it?” he whispered. “Is not all life from the cradle to the grave one long yearning for that which we never touch? There must be a Hereafter because we cannot think of any end to life. Can we think of a beginning? Is it easier to say ‘I was not’ than to say ‘I shall not be?’ And yet, where were we ninety years ago? Dreams, dreams! Ah, all dreams and lies! No ground anywhere.”

He went back into the cabin and walked there. Hour after hour passed, and he was dreaming.

For, mark you, men will dream; the most that can be asked of them is but that the dream be not in too glaring discord with the thing they know. He walked with bent head.

All dies, all dies! the roses are red with the matter that once reddened the cheek of the child; the flowers bloom the fairest on the last year’s battle-ground; the work of death’s finger cunningly wreathed over is at the heart of all things, even of the living. Death’s finger is everywhere. The rocks are built up of a life that was. Bodies, thoughts, and loves die: from where springs that whisper to the tiny soul of man, “You shall not die?” Ah, is there no truth of which this dream is shadow?

He fell into perfect silence. And at last, as he walked there with his bent head, his soul passed down the steps of contemplation into that vast land where there is always peace; that land where the soul, gazing long, looses all consciousness of its little self, and almost feels its hand on the old mystery of Universal Unity that surrounds it.

“No death, no death,” he muttered; “there is that which never dies — which abides. It is but the individual that perishes, the whole remains. It is the organism that vanishes, the atoms are there. It is but the man that dies, the Universal Whole of which he is part reworks him into its inmost self. Ah, what matter that man’s day be short! — that the sunrise sees him, and the sunset sees his grave; that of which he is but the breath has breathed him forth and drawn him back again. That abides — we abide.”

For the little soul that cries aloud for continued personal existence for itself and its beloved, there is no help. For the soul which knows itself no more as a unit, but as a part of the Universal Unity of which the Beloved also is a part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is no death.