Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volume 30, 1874 - MacMillan's Magazine

Ordered South.
73
small difference "wlietlier he die five
thousand years, or live thousand and
fifty years, before the good epoch for
which he faithfully labours. lie has
not deceived himself; he has known
from the beginning that he followed the
pillar of fire' and cloud, only to perish
himself in the wilderness, and that it
was reserved for others to enter joy-
fully into possession of the land. And
so, as everything grows greyer and
(piieter aboxit him, and slopes towards
extinction, these unladed visions accom-
pany his sad decline, and follow him,
with friendly voices and hopeful words,
into the very vestibule of death. The
desire of love or of fame scarcely moved
him, in his days of health, more strongly
than these generous aspirations move
him now ; and so life is carried forward
beyond life, and a vista kept open for
the eyes of hope, even when his hands
grope already on the face of the im-
passable.
Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life
by the thought of his friends ; or shall
we not say rather, that by their thought
for him, by their tinchangeable solici-
tude and love, he remains woven into
the very stuff of life, beyond the power
of bodily dissolution to undo 1 In a
thousand ways will he survive and be
perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la
IJoetie survived during all the years
in which ^lontaigne continued to con-
verse with him on the pages of the
ever-delightful essays. Much of what
was truly Goethe was dead already
when he revisited places that knew him
no more, and found no better consola-
tion than the j^romise of his own
verses, that soon he too w^ould be at
rest. Indeed, when we think of what
it is that we most seek and cherish,
and find most pride and pleasure in
calling ours, it will sometimes seem to
us as if our friends, at our decease,
would suffer loss more truly than our-
selves. As a monarch who should care
more for the outlying colonies he knows
on the map or through the report of his
vicegerents, than for the trunk of his
empire under his eyes at home, are we-
not more concerned about the shadowy
life that we have in the hearts of others,
and that portion in their thoughts and
fancies which, in a certain far-away sense,
belongs to us, than about the real knot
of our identity — that central metro-
polis of self, of which alone we are
immediately aware — or the diligent ser-
vice of arteries and veins, and infinite-
simal activity of ganglia, which we know
(as we know a proposition in Euclid) to
be the source and substance of the
whole] At the death of every one
whom we love, some fair and honourable
portion of our existence falls away, and
we are dislodged from one of these dear
provinces ; and they are not, perhaps,
the most fortunate who survive a long
series of such impoverishments, till
their life and influence narrow gradually
into the meagre limit of their own spirits,
and death, when he comes at last, can
scotch them at one blow.
Egbert Louis Stevexson.