ii6 At the Darkest Hour. 



even in its ignorance and weakness, wholly believe the 

 kindly meant promissory. At best we resign ourselves to 

 lapse from life with a shudder and a sense of awful heart- 

 break, and oh the brink of the great darkness shrink back, 

 and, feebly struggling to breathe again, turn our dim 

 eyes to the beautiful light. 



Man has literally fought his way upward ; he has bat- 

 tled for life and supremacy, first, with the fiercer orders 

 of the carnivora, the cave-bear, the machairodus, then with 

 his fellow-man for political and moral freedom. His last 

 grim foe is death. " The last enemy that shall be de- 

 stroyed is death." But as yet — 



" Death reigns. Dust unto dust must go. 

 The nations wail of their dread foe. 

 The bitter waters of that Wormwood star 

 Which burns malign, from pole to pole, 

 Are to be drunk. Who may console 

 Their mortal woe ? Outwelling from afar 

 The grief of worlds bewails its dying pains, 

 A cosmic dirge, moaning it comes, Death reigns." 



To all normal, healthy life, death is unquestionably an 

 SYil. Nature has nothing in common with those theorists 

 who, making a virtue of temporal misfortune, seek to per- 

 suade man that death is a blessing. Scant must be their 

 souls. Man has developed to live, not to die ; and time 

 and space given, man is omnipotent. 



How much of literature is a dirge, a cry of mortal 



