358 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. XI. 



I believe from what I have felt when brought very near to 

 the grave, that the engrossing, devouring idea is, that of 

 one's own individuality or personality, and of God's per- 

 sonality. The prevailing feeling is that of the great Judge 

 waiting for our soul as if there were no other soul in exist- 

 ence, and we, in our naked spirituality, without one relative, 

 earthly friend, or well-wisher, about to pass away into the 

 darkness, and stand before God. No transmutation which 

 chemist or alchymist ever hoped for, or ever realized, has 

 equalled, or can equal, the strangeness of that transforma- 

 tion which we shall undergo when we gasp out of this life 

 into the next. Chemistry will not help us then. ' If there 

 be knowledge, it shall vanish away.' " In 1848, a letter to 

 Mr. Daniel Macmillan contains the following passage : " I 

 have been reading lately, with great sadness, the Memorials 

 of Charles Lamb and the Life of Keats. There is some- 

 thing in the noble brotherly love of Charles to brighten, 

 and hallow, and relieve the former ; but Keats's deathbed 

 is the blackness of midnight, unmitigated by one ray of 

 light. 



" God keep you and me from such a deathbed ! We 

 may have physical agonies as great to endure. It is the 

 common lot. I feel that our heavenly Father can better 

 choose for us than we can for ourselves, of what we should 

 die ; but I pray our blessed Lord and Master to be with us 

 in our last fight with the last enemy, and to give us the 

 victory. If He does, what shall pain be, but, like other 

 bitter medicines, the preparative for the unbroken health of 

 an endless life?" And in 1857 he says: "Often and 

 often, as I have asked myself of what should I die, I have 

 felt that, had I the choice offered me among physical deaths, 

 I should not know how to choose, and would leave to God 

 the appointment of the mode of dying, beseeching only to 



