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Show Life and Death. The bottom of the sea, as the dredging of the Challenger proves, is paved with relics of countless elaborate lives, seemingly seem-ingly wasted. The great pyramid is a mountain of by-gone nummulities. The statesman's marble statue is compacted from the shells and casts of tiny creatures which had as good a right to immortality from their own point of view as he. Moreover, it may be urged, the suicide, who only seeks peace and escape from trouble, confronts death with just as clear a decisiveness as the brave sailor or dutiful duti-ful soldier. Most suicides, however, in their last written words, seem to expect a change for the better, rather than extinction; extinc-tion; and it is a curious proof of the propriety and self-respect of the very desperate, that forlorn women, jumping from Waterloo bridge, almost always fold their shawls quite neatly,lay them on the parapet, and place their bonnets carefully care-fully atop, as if the fatal balustrade were but a boudoir for the disrobing soul. In regard to the argument of equal rights of continuous existence for all things which live, it must be admitted. If the bathybia nay even if the trees and the mosses are not, as to that which makes them individual, undying, man will never be. If life be not as inextinguishable in every eg or tne nerrmg auu n . cvcij uuu uu. beast as in the poet and the sage, it is extinguishable in angels and archangels. What, then, is that varying existence which can survive and take new shapes, when the small dying sea creature drops its flake of pearl to the ooze, when the dog fish swallows a thousand trivial herring her-ring fry, and when the poet and the sage lie silent and cold. Edwin Arnold, in the Fortnightly Review. |