simple way of love and service and
prayer.

His comments upon the death of his brother give us a vivid idea of the
state of mind of the Tolstoi of that age:

"Never in my life has anything had such an effect upon me. He was right
(referring to his brother's words) when he said to me there is nothing
worse than death, and if you remember that death is the inevitable goal of
all that lives, then it must be confessed that there is nothing poorer than
life. Why should we be so careful when at the end of all things nothing
remains of what was once Nicolai Tolstoi? Suddenly he started up and
murmured in alarm: 'What is this?' He saw that he was passing into
nothingness."

From the above it will be seen that the Tolstoi of those days was a
materialist pure and simple. "He saw that he was passing into nothingness,"
he said of his brother, as though there could be no question as to the
nothingness of the individual consciousness that he had known as Nicolai,
his brother.

This soul-harrowing materialism haunted Tolstoi during all the years of his
youth and early manhood, and threw him constantly into fits of melancholy
and inner brooding. He could neither dismiss the subject from his mind, nor
could he bring into the area of his mortal consciousness that serene
contemplation and optimistic line of reasoning which marks all that Emerson
wrote.

Tolstoi's morbid horror of decay and death was not in any sense due to a
lack of physical courage. It was the inevitable repulsion of a strong and
robust animalism of the body, coupled with a powerful mentality--both of
which are barriers to the "still small voice" of the soul, through which
alone comes the conviction of the nothingness of death.

A biographer says of Tolstoi:

"The fit of the fear of death which at the end of the seventies brought him
to the verge of suicide, was not the first and apparently not the last and
at any rate not the only one. He felt something like it fifteen years
before when his brother Nicolai died. Then he fell ill and conjectured the
presence of the complaint that killed his brother--consumption. He had
constant pain in his chest and side. He had to go and try to cure himself
in the Steppe by a course of koumiss, and did actually cure himself.
Formerly these recurrent attacks of spiritual or physical weakness were
cured in him, not by any mental or moral upheavals, but simply by his
vitality, its exuberance and intoxication."

The birth of the