y before it--no one can be sure that it may not fall to him or
her even at the eleventh hour. Money and immortality come in such odd
unaccountable ways that no one is cut off from hope. We may not have
made either of them for ourselves, but yet another may give them to us in
virtue of his or her love, which shall illumine us for ever, and
establish us in some heavenly mansion whereof we neither dreamed nor
shall ever dream. Look at the Doge Loredano Loredani, the old man's
smile upon whose face has been reproduced so faithfully in so many lands
that it can never henceforth be forgotten--would he have had one
hundredth part of the life he now lives had he not been linked awhile
with one of those heaven-sent men who know _che cosa e amor_? Look at
Rembrandt's old woman in our National Gallery; had she died before she
was eighty-three years old she would not have been living now. Then,
when she was eighty-three, immortality perched upon her as a bird on a
withered bough.

I seem to hear some one say that this is a mockery, a piece of special
pleading, a giving of stones to those that ask for bread. Life is not
life unless we can feel it, and a life limited to a knowledge of such
fraction of our work as may happen to survive us is no true life in other
people; salve it as we may, death is not life any more than black is
white.

The objection is not so true as it sounds. I do not deny that we had
rather not die, nor do I pretend that much even in the case of the most
favoured few can survive them beyond the grave. It is only because this
is so that our own life is possible; others have made room for us, and we
should make room for others in our turn without undue repining. What I
maintain is that a not inconsiderable number of people do actually attain
to a life beyond the grave which we can all feel forcibly enough, whether
they can do so or not--that this life tends with increasing civilisation
to become more and more potent, and that it is better worth considering,
in spite of its being unfelt by ourselves, than any which we have felt or
can ever feel in our own persons.

Take an extreme case. A group of people are photographed by Edison's new
process--say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with any two of the
finest men singers the age has known--let them be photographed
incessantly for half an hour while they perform a scene in "Lohengrin";
let all be done stereoscopically. Let them be phonographed at the s