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

Ordered South 1 49
than the promise of his own verses, that soon
he too would 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 ourselves. 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 metropolis of self, of which
alone we are immediately aware — or the
diligent service of arteries and veins and
infinitesimal 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