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

148 Ordered South
accompany 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
impassable.
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
unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains
woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the
power of bodily dissolution to undo ? In a
thousand ways will he survive and be per-
petuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie
survived during all the years in which
Montaigne continued to converse 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 consolation