SOUNDINGS 



of a body as at absolute rest, but can we conceive of 

 it going so fast that it could not go faster? 



Death is our consciousness of a peculiar change in 

 matter, just as life is our consciousness of the oppo- 

 site change — one destructive, the other construc- 

 tive. The constituents of the body remain un- 

 changed, but a peculiar activity set up among the 

 particles, by what, we know not, is instituted in life 

 and ceases in death. An organism is made up of 

 organs, all working together, but each subordinated 

 to the whole. The whole, this concerted action, may 

 cease, and the individual dies, as we say, and yet 

 the minute subdivisions, the cells, may be alive. 

 Certain ferments in the body may go on for some 

 time after the life of the man has gone out. And liv- 

 ing cells may go on multiplying endlessly without 

 producing an organized being. 



II 



" It is all right," said Walt Whitman to me as I was 

 leaving his death-bed and hearing his voice for the 

 last time — "It is all right." Of course it was all 

 right, and it will be all right when each and all of us 

 fall into the last eternal sleep. Else it would not be. 

 Our being here is all right, is it not? "Friendly and 

 faithful," says Whitman, "are the arms that have 

 helped me," and friendly and faithful must be the 

 arms that bear us away. If it was good to come, it 

 will be good to go — good in the large, cosmic sense, 



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