joy of a world
uplifted by music. Thus instructed, his broken life succumbs.

Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave,
The All-creating Presence for his grave.

In this poem George Eliot regards death as a means of drawing men into a
deeper and truer sympathy with each other. The same thought is more fully
presented when she exultingly sings,--

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self.
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.

Death teaches us to forget self, to live for others, to pour out unstinted
sympathy and affection for those whose lives are short and difficult. It is
the same thought as that given in reply to Young; mortal sorrows and pains
should move us as hopes of immortality cannot. There accompanies this idea
the larger one, that our future life is to be found in the better life we
make for those who come after us. George Eliot believed with Comte, that we
are to live again in minds made better by what we have done and been, that
an influence goes out from every helpful and good life which makes the
lives of those who come after us fairer and grander.

She rests this belief on no sentimental or ideal grounds. Its justification
is to be found in science, in the law of hereditary transmission. Darwin
and Spencer base the great world-process of evolution on the two laws of
transmission and variation. The fittest survives, and the world advances.
The survival of every fit and positive form of life in the better forms
which succeed it is in accordance with a process or a law which holds true
up into all the highest and subtlest expressions of man's inner life.
Heredity is as true morally and spiritually as physically, and our moral
and spiritual offspring will partake of our own qualities; and, standing on
the vantage ground of our lives, will rise higher than we. What George
Eliot regards as the positive teaching of science becomes also an inspiring
religious belief to her.

George Eliot accepted the belief of an immortality in the race with a deep
and earnest conviction. It gave a great impulse to her life, it satisfied
her craving for closer harmony and sympathy with her fellows, it satisfied
her longing for the pow