saw them in the flesh, and know not even their names?  There is a nisus, a straining in the dull dumb economy of things, in virtue of which some, whether they will it and know it or no, are more likely to live after death than others, and who are these?  Those who aimed at it as by some great thing that they would do to make them famous?  Those who have lived most in themselves and for themselves, or those who have been most ensouled consciously, but perhaps better unconsciously, directly but more often indirectly, by the most living souls past and present that have flitted near them?  Can we think of a man or woman who grips us firmly, at the thought of whom we kindle when we are alone in our honest daw’s plumes, with none to admire or shrug his shoulders, can we think of one such, the secret of whose power does not lie in the charm of his or her personality—­that is to say, in the wideness of his or her sympathy with, and therefore life in and communion with other people?  In the wreckage that comes ashore from the sea of time there is much tinsel stuff that we must preserve and study if we would know our own times and people; granted that many a dead charlatan lives long and enters largely and necessarily into our own lives; we use them and throw them away when we have done with them.  I do not speak of these, I do not speak of the Virgils and Alexander Popes, and who can say how many more whose names I dare not mention for fear of offending.  They are as stuffed birds or beasts in a museum; serviceable no doubt from a scientific standpoint, but with no vivid or vivifying hold upon us.  They seem to be alive, but are not.  I am speaking of those who do actually live in us, and move us to higher achievements though they be long dead, whose life thrusts out our own and overrides it.  I speak of those who draw us ever more towards them from youth to age, and to think of whom is to feel at once that we are in the hands of those we love, and whom we would most wish to resemble.  What is the secret of the hold that these people have upon us?  Is it not that while, conventionally speaking, alive, they most merged their lives in, and were in fullest communion with those among whom they lived?  They found their lives in losing them.  We never love the memory of anyone unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.

I have seen it urged, again, in querulous accents, that the so-called immortality even of the most immortal is not for ever.  I see a passage to this effect in a book that is making a stir as I write.  I will quote it.  The writer says:—­

“So, it seems to me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of departed artists.  If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant but inevitable death.  They can no longer, as heretofore, speak directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry, of which imagination