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RETAINING THE INDIVIDUALITY. 
proportioned exactly to the efforts which it makes in its anterior 
condition of life. 
Admirable compensation ! When penetrating so deep down into life, 
I expected to encounter certain physical fatalities. And I found justice, 
immortality, and hope. 
Yes, antiquity was right, and modern science is right. It is death, 
and yet it is not death; let us call it if you will partial death. Is 
death ever otherwise ? Is it not a new birth ? 
Throughout my life I have remarked that each day I died and was 
born again; I have undergone many painful strugglings and laborious 
transformations. One more does not astonish me. Many and many 
times I have passed from the larva into the chrysalis, and into a more 
complete condition; the which, after awhile, incomplete under other 
relations, has put me in the way of accomplishing a new circle of 
metamorphoses. 
All this from me to me, but not less from me to those who were 
still me, who loved me, or made me, or, so long as I lived, whom I made. 
These, too, have been, or will be, my metamorphoses. Sometimes, a 
certain intonation or gesture which I detect makes me exclaim :—“ Ah ! 
this is a gesture or a tone of my father.” I had not foreseen it, and 
if I had foreseen it, it would not have occurred; reflection had changed 
all; but, not thinking of it, I employed it. A tender emotion, a holy 
impulse seized me, when I felt my father thus living in myself. Are 
w T e two ? Were we one ? Oh ! it was my chrysalis. And I—I play 
the same part for those who shall follow me, my children, or the children 
of my thought. I know, I feel, that besides the bases which I derived 
from my father, my ancestors and masters, besides the inheritance of 
artist-historian which I shall bequeath to others, germs existed within 
me which were never developed. Another, and perchance a better, 
man was within me, who has not arisen. Why were not the loftier 
germs which might have made me great, and the powerful wings of 
which I have sometimes felt myself possessed, displayed in life and 
action ? 
These germs, though put aside, remain to me; too late for expansion 
in this life, perhaps, but in another,—who knows ? 
