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HUMAN SPIRIT DISTINCT FROM MATTER. 345

"What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our
own corpse-coffins at last,

Swallowed in vastness, lost in silence, drown'd in
the deeps of a meaningless past?"

What if our philosophies and arts and sciences and human loves and noble deeds pass into eternal silence? Then God has surely mocked us, and human life, with its pathetic cry for fuller, richer being, is but "a murmur of gnats in the gloom." The poet falls back on love, and rests in it, as the deepest thing in the soul demanding immortality. Death cannot kill love nor the loved one and, as he recalls the memory of his friend, he sings once again in the shrine of love the song of immortal life.

"Peace, let it be! for I loved him and love him for
ever the dead are not dead but alive."

The Human Fifth-He finds an argument in the human Spirit Dis- spirit as an entity distinct from matter.

tinct from

In the "Ancient Sage" the mystic dreamer Matter. tells how his self or spirit became separated from the body and in its separation entered into life unspeakable.

"I touch'd my limbs, the limbs

Were strange not mine and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self

The gain of such large life as match'd with ours
Were sun to spark-unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world,"

In such experiences, more common among the dreamers of the Orient, the poet finds a mystic hint of immortality. Indeed, the letter, penned by himself and already quoted, shows that in this passage he was relating his own experience as a trance medium. Whatever may be said of the experience, doubtless the fact that we do not think of spirit in the terms of matter becomes an argument for existence apart from matter and is expressed in the passage.

Thus in all his works the poet protests, with glowing indignation, against the crass materialism that would resolve all of man into dust. It is incredible that the mighty forces of nature and of civilisation should have spent themselves on the making of man, only, at last, as he rises to higher life, to use the hidden hands that made him, to thrust him back into the grave of eternal silence and sleep.

"What then were God to such as I?

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'Twere best at once to sink to peace,
Like birds the charming serpent draws
To drop head-foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness, and to cease."

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