fire.
We must go on to new experiences and new adventures. Death comes to part
us and turn us out and set us on the road again.

But the dead stay where we leave them.

I suppose that is the real good in death, that they do stay; that it
makes them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they
can never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again. They have
finished--for us indeed just as much as themselves. There they sit for
ever, rounded off and bright and done. Beside these clear and certain
memories I have of my dead, my impressions of the living are vague
provisional things.

And since they are gone out of the world and become immortal memories
in me, I feel no need to think of them as in some disembodied and
incomprehensible elsewhere, changed and yet not done. I want actual
immortality for those I love as little as I desire it for myself.

Indeed I dislike the idea that those I have loved are immortal in any
real sense; it conjures up dim uncomfortable drifting phantoms, that
have no kindred with the flesh and blood I knew. I would as soon think
of them trailing after the tides up and down the Channel outside my
window. Bob Stevenson for me is a presence utterly concrete, slouching,
eager, quick-eyed, intimate and profound, carelessly dressed (at
Sandgate he commonly wore a little felt hat that belonged to his son)
and himself, himself, indissoluble matter and spirit, down to the
heels of his boots. I cannot conceive of his as any but a concrete
immortality. If he lives, he lives as I knew him and clothed as I knew
him and with his unalterable voice, in a heaven of daedal flowers or
a hell of ineffectual flame; he lives, dreaming and talking and
explaining, explaining it all very earnestly and preposterously, so I
picture him, into the ear of the amused, incredulous, principal person
in the place.

I have a real hatred for those dreary fools and knaves who would have me
suppose that Henley, that crippled Titan, may conceivably be tapping at
the underside of a mahogany table or scratching stifled incoherence
into a locked slate! Henley tapping!--for the professional purposes of
Sludge! If he found himself among the circumstances of a spiritualist
seance he would, I know, instantly smash the table with that big fist of
his. And as the splinters flew, surely York Powell, out of the dead past
from which he shines on me, would laugh that hearty laugh of his back
into the world again.

Henley is no