conscious effort
will help us, but we are speaking of large issues, and such kingdoms of
heaven as the making the best of these come not by observation.

The question, therefore, on which I have undertaken to address you is, as
you must all know, fatuous, if it be faced seriously. Life is like
playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes
on. One cannot make the best of such impossibilities, and the question
is doubly fatuous until we are told which of our two lives--the conscious
or the unconscious--is held by the asker to be the truer life. Which
does the question contemplate--the life we know, or the life which others
may know, but which we know not?

Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-
called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of
Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the "Odyssey," and of
Jane Austen--the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within
their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating
in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life consist--their
own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life till a
hundred years or so after he was dead and buried? His physical life was
but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and
dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to
enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we
are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as
regards that life which every age and country has recognised as higher
and truer than the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the
race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than
that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more
important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere
perhaps more plainly than in the case of great teachers, who often in the
lives of their pupils produce an effect that reaches far beyond anything
produced while their single lives were yet unsupplemented by those other
lives into which they infused their own.

Death to such people is the ending of a short life, but it does not touch
the life they are already living in those whom they have taught; and
happily, as none can know when he shall die, so none can make sure that
he too shall not live long beyond the grave; for the life after death is
like mone