be very real--this can be, and is, influenced by just
appreciation, undue praise or calumny, and is subject, it may be, to
secular vicissitudes of good and evil fortune.

"If this is not true, let us have no more talk about the immortality of
great men and women. The Sunchild was never weary of talking to us (as
we then sometimes thought, a little tediously) about a great poet of that
nation to which it pleased him to feign that he belonged. How plainly
can we not now see that his words were spoken for our learning--for the
enforcement of that true view of heaven and hell on which I am feebly
trying to insist? The poet's name, he said, was Shakespeare. Whilst he
was alive, very few people understood his greatness; whereas now, after
some three hundred years, he is deemed the greatest poet that the world
has ever known. 'Can this man,' he asked, 'be said to have been truly
born till many a long year after he had been reputed as truly dead? While
he was in the flesh, was he more than a mere embryo growing towards birth
into that life of the world to come in which he now shines so gloriously?
What a small thing was that flesh and blood life, of which he was alone
conscious, as compared with that fleshless life which he lives but knows
not in the lives of millions, and which, had it ever been fully revealed
even to his imagination, we may be sure that he could not have reached?'

"These were the Sunchild's words, as repeated to me by one of his chosen
friends while he was yet amongst us. Which, then, of this man's two
lives should we deem best worth having, if we could choose one or other,
but not both? The felt or the unfelt? Who would not go cheerfully to
block or stake if he knew that by doing so he could win such life as this
poet lives, though he also knew that on having won it he could know no
more about it? Does not this prove that in our heart of hearts we deem
an unfelt life, in the heaven of men's loving thoughts, to be better
worth having than any we can reasonably hope for and still feel?

"And the converse of this is true; many a man has unhesitatingly laid
down his felt life to escape unfelt infamy in the hell of men's hatred
and contempt. As body is the sacrament, or outward and visible sign, of
mind; so is posterity the sacrament of those who live after death. Each
is the mechanism through which the other becomes effective.

"I grant that many live but a short time when the breath is out of the