Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1881 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

1 62 Ordered South.
of cases — we so collect about us the interest or the love of
our fellows, so multiply our effective part in the affairs of
life, that we need to entertain no longer the question
of our right to be.
And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies him-
self dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful view
expressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to
help, some to love, some to correct ; it may be, some to
punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon
the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one
woman's son and a second woman's husband and a third
woman's father. That life which began so small, has
now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives of
others. It is not indispensable ; another will take the
place and shoulder the discharged responsibility ; but
the better the man and the nobler his purposes, the more
will he be tempted to regret the extinction of his powers
and the deletion of his personality. To have lived a
generation, is not only to have grown at home in that
perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable
duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely
base, something of the air of a betrayal. A man does
not only reflect upon what he might have done in a
future that is never to be his ; but beholding himself so
early a deserter from the fight, he eats his heart for the
good he might have done already. To have been so
useless and now to lose all -hope of being useful any