DEATH 



MNES una manet nox," sang Horace cen- 

 turies ago ; and since his day every poet 

 who has left a stanza — nay ! even a 

 single line to the literature of the world, 

 has set his seal of words to the Univer- 

 sality of Death. 

 Some few have even seen below the calm surface of the 

 Great Sleep and caught a glimpse of that Dream of Life 

 which is inseparable from the Dream of Death. 



" How beautiful," writes Jean Paul, " is Death, seeing 

 that we die in a world of Life." " All death is birth," says 

 Fichte. 



Yet even those who thus see, " as in a glass darkly," the 

 interdependence of the two pivots of the unceasing Wheel, 

 see them only as they concern Humanity, as they belong to 

 the human face of the looker which is also reflected in the 

 glass darkly. 



Search, indeed, as you will through the literatures of the 

 western world, it will only be to find that Golgotha as well 

 as Bethlehem exists only as the monopoly of Man. 



In the East it is otherwise ; — that East which is at once so 

 careful and so cruel in dealing with the beasts that perish ; 

 which forbids the taking of life, yet does not hesitate to 



