in his last home the object of so much love, ask yourself
whether, even in a mere human point of view, this parenthesis between
two darknesses has not been on the whole productive of more happiness
than pain to him and to those around him.

It was an ancient saying that 'he whom the gods love dies young,' and
more than one legend representing speedy and painless death as the
greatest of blessings has descended to us from pagan antiquity; while
other legends, like that of Tithonus, anticipated the picture which
Swift has so powerfully but so repulsively drawn of the misery of old
age and its infirmities, if death did not come as a release. I have
elsewhere related an old Irish legend embodying this truth. 'In a
certain lake in Munster, it is said, there were two islands; into the
first death could never enter, but age and sickness, and the weariness
of life and the paroxysms of fearful suffering were all known there, and
they did their work till the inhabitants, tired of their immortality,
learned to look upon the opposite island as upon a haven of repose. They
launched their barks upon its gloomy waters; they touched its shore, and
they were at rest.'[80]

No one, however, can confidently say whether an early death is a
misfortune, for no one can really know what calamities would have
befallen the dead man if his life had been prolonged. How often does it
happen that the children of a dead parent do things or suffer things
that would have broken his heart if he had lived to see them! How often
do painful diseases lurk in germ in the body which would have produced
unspeakable misery if an early and perhaps a painless death had not
anticipated their development! How often do mistakes and misfortunes
cloud the evening and mar the beauty of a noble life, or moral
infirmities, unperceived in youth or early manhood, break out before the
day is over! Who is there who has not often said to himself as he looked
back on a completed life, how much happier it would have been had it
ended sooner? 'Give us timely death' is in truth one of the best prayers
that man can pray. Pain, not Death, is the real enemy to be combated,
and in this combat, at least, man can do much. Few men can have lived
long without realising how many things are worse than death, and how
many knots there are in life that Death alone can untie.

Remember, above all, that whatever may lie beyond the tomb, the tomb
itself is nothing to you. The narrow prison-hou