ually above, and setting aside also the chances and changes from which
even immortality is not exempt, who on the whole are most likely to live
anew in the affectionate thoughts of those who never so much as saw them
in the flesh, and know not even their names? There is a _nisus_, a
straining in the dull dumb economy of things, in virtue of which some,
whether they will it and know it or no, are more likely to live after
death than others, and who are these? Those who aimed at it as by some
great thing that they would do to make them famous? Those who have lived
most in themselves and for themselves, or those who have been most
ensouled consciously, but perhaps better unconsciously, directly but more
often indirectly, by the most living souls past and present that have
flitted near them? Can we think of a man or woman who grips us firmly,
at the thought of whom we kindle when we are alone in our honest daw's
plumes, with none to admire or shrug his shoulders, can we think of one
such, the secret of whose power does not lie in the charm of his or her
personality--that is to say, in the wideness of his or her sympathy with,
and therefore life in and communion with other people? In the wreckage
that comes ashore from the sea of time there is much tinsel stuff that we
must preserve and study if we would know our own times and people;
granted that many a dead charlatan lives long and enters largely and
necessarily into our own lives; we use them and throw them away when we
have done with them. I do not speak of these, I do not speak of the
Virgils and Alexander Popes, and who can say how many more whose names I
dare not mention for fear of offending. They are as stuffed birds or
beasts in a Museum, serviceable no doubt from a scientific standpoint,
but with no vivid or vivifying hold upon us. They seem to be alive, but
are not. I am speaking of those who do actually live in us, and move us
to higher achievements though they be long dead, whose life thrusts out
our own and overrides it. I speak of those who draw us ever more towards
them from youth to age, and to think of whom is to feel at once that we
are in the hands of those we love, and whom we would most wish to
resemble. What is the secret of the hold that these people have upon us?
Is it not that while, conventionally speaking, alive, they most merged
their lives in, and were in fullest communion with those among whom they
lived? They found their lives in los