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experiences may be serenely compared. Meantime, however, _we_ have not
yet reached that measureless content, and death scares, piques,
tantalises, as mind and nerve are built. Situated as we are, knowing
that it is inevitable, we cannot keep our thoughts from resting on it
curiously, at times. Nothing interests us so much. The Highland seer
pretended that he could see the winding-sheet high upon the breast of
the man for whom death was waiting. Could we behold any such visible
sign, the man who bore it, no matter where he stood--even if he were a
slave watching Caesar pass--would usurp every eye. At the coronation
of a king, the wearing of that order would dim royal robe, quench the
sparkle of the diadem, and turn to vanity the herald's cry. Death
makes the meanest beggar august, and that augustness would assert
itself in the presence of a king. And it is this curiosity with regard
to everything related to death and dying which makes us treasure up the
last sayings of great men, and attempt to wring out of them tangible
meanings. Was Goethe's "Light--light, more light!" a prayer, or a
statement of spiritual experience, or simply an utterance of the fact
that the room in which he lay was filling with the last twilight? In
consonance with our own natures, we interpret it the one way or the
other--_he_ is beyond our questioning. For the same reason it is that
men take interest in executions--from Charles I. on the scaffold at
Whitehall, to Porteous in the Grassmarket execrated by the mob. These
men are not dulled by disease, they are not delirious with fever; they
look death in the face, and what in these circumstances they say and do
has the strangest fascination for us.

What does the murderer think when his eyes are forever blinded by the
accursed nightcap? In what form did thought condense itself between
the gleam of the lifted axe and the rolling of King Charles's head in
the saw-dust? This kind of speculation may be morbid, but it is not
necessarily so. All extremes of human experience touch us; and we have
all the deepest personal interest in the experience of death. Out of
all we know about dying we strive to clutch something which may break
its solitariness, and relieve us by a touch of companionship.

To denude death of its terrible associations were a vain attempt. The
atmosphere is always cold around an iceberg. In the contemplation of
dying the spirit may not flinch, but pulse and heart, c