ngs which having existed many thousand years, seemed eternal; such a
state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic intercourse, as had
moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then
to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the
name of country, we had bidden farewell. We saw depart all hope of
retrieving our ancient state--all expectation, except the feeble one of
saving our individual lives from the wreck of the past. To preserve these
we had quitted England--England, no more; for without her children, what
name could that barren island claim? With tenacious grasp we clung to such
rule and order as could best save us; trusting that, if a little colony
could be preserved, that would suffice at some remoter period to restore
the lost community of mankind.

But the game is up! We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the
wide inheritance of earth. We must all die! The species of man must perish;
his frame of exquisite workmanship; the wondrous mechanism of his senses;
the noble proportion of his godlike limbs; his mind, the throned king of
these; must perish. Will the earth still keep her place among the planets;
will she still journey with unmarked regularity round the sun; will the
seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed
their fragrance, in solitude? Will the mountains remain unmoved, and
streams still keep a downward course towards the vast abyss; will the tides
rise and fall, and the winds fan universal nature; will beasts pasture,
birds fly, and fishes swim, when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and
recorder of all these things, has passed away, as though he had never been?
O, what mockery is this! Surely death is not death, and humanity is not
extinct; but merely passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our
perceptions. Death is a vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to
pass; let us exist no more in this living death, but die that we may live!

We had longed with inexpressible earnestness to reach Dijon, since we had
fixed on it, as a kind of station in our progress. But now we entered it
with a torpor more painful than acute suffering. We had come slowly but
irrevocably to the opinion, that our utmost efforts would not preserve one
human being alive. We took our hands therefore away from the long grasped
rudder; and the frail vessel on which we floated, seemed, the government
over her suspended, to r