Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

Ordered South 145
grow feebler and smaller and the attitude
more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes
us at a stride and we move no more, so
desire after desire leaves him ; day by day
his strength decreases, and the circle of his
activity grows ever narrower ; and he feels,
if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the
passion of life, thus gradually inducted into
the slumber of death, that when at last the
end comes, it will come quietly and fitly.
If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the
coming of the last enemy, surely it should
be such a mild approach as this ; not to hale
us forth with violence, but to persuade us
from a place we have no further pleasure in.
It is not so much, indeed, death that
approaches as life that withdraws and withers
up from round about him. He has outlived
his own usefulness, and almost his own
enjoyment ; and if there is to be no recovery;
if never again will he be young and strong
and passionate, if the actual present shall be
to him always like a thing read in a book or
remembered out of the far-away past ; if, in