“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
  This sensible warm motion to become
  A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
  To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
  In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
  To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
  And blown with restless violence round about
  The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
  Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
  Imagine howling!”

Nor were such terrors mediaeval only.  Till quite recent years they cast a gloom over the existence of honourable and laborious men.  Remember that scene in Oxford when Dr. Johnson, with a look of horror, acknowledged that he was much oppressed by the fear of death, and when the amiable Dr. Adams suggested that God was infinitely good, he replied: 

“’As I cannot be sure that I have fulfilled the conditions on which salvation is granted, I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be damned’ (looking dismally).  Dr. Adams:  ‘What do you mean by damned?’ Johnson (passionately and loudly):  ’Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.’”

No one disputes that for many ages the lives of even the just and good were burdened by such oppressive fears.  Perhaps, indeed, the just and good were more burdened than the wicked; for to the wicked their own sins seldom appear so deadly black, and when a Balkan priest lately displayed pictures of eternal torment as warnings to a savage mountaineer’s enormities, he was met by the reply, “Even we should not be so cruel.”  But to the greater part of thinking mankind, Maeterlinck’s reassurances upon the subject, even if they could be established, would appear a little out-of-date, and I do not believe that, even where they linger, such terrors form the basis of the fear of death.  Was there not, at all events, one strenuous Canon of the Established Church who defiantly proclaimed that he would rather be damned than annihilated?

“Men fear death,” says Bacon’s familiar sentence; “men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark.”  It is not the dread of pain and torment; it is the dark that terrifies; it is Kingsley’s horror of annihilation; it is the hot life’s fear of ceasing to be.  I grant that many are unconscious of this fear.  In word, at all events, there are multitudes, perhaps the greater part of mankind, who long for the annihilation of self, who direct their lives by the great hope of becoming in the end absorbed into the Universe.  Their perpetual prayer is to be rid of personality at the last, no matter through what strange embodiments the self must pass before it reach the bliss of nothingness.  Similar, though less doctrinal, was the prayer of Job when he counted himself among those who long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave.  “Why died I not from the womb?” he cried: