simply a
piece of good fortune. If I could know that such would be the manner of
my own death, a real weight would be lifted from my mind. To die
quickly and suddenly, in all the activity of life, in comparative
tranquillity, with none of the hideous apparatus of the sick-room about
one, with no dreary waiting for death, that is a great joy. But for his
wife and his poor girls! To have had no last word, no conscious look
from one whose delicate consideration for others was so marked a part
of his nature, this is a terrible and stupefying misery.

I cannot, of course, even dimly realise what has happened; the
remoteness of it all, the knowledge that my own outer life is
absolutely unchanged, that the days will flow on as usual, makes it
trebly difficult to feel what has befallen me. I cannot think of him as
dead and silent; yet even before I heard the news, he was buried. I
cannot, of course, help feeling that the struggling spirit of my friend
tried to fling me, as it were, some last message; or that I suffered
with him, and shared his last conscious thought.

Perhaps I shall grow to think of Herbert as dead. But, meanwhile, I am
preoccupied with one thought, that such an event ought not to come upon
one as such a stunning and trembling shock as it does. It reveals to
one the fact of how incomplete one's philosophy of life is. One ought,
I feel, deliberately to reckon with death, and to discount it. It is,
after all, the only certain future event in our lives.

And yet we struggle with it, put it away from us, live and plan as
though it had no existence; or, if it insistently clouds our thoughts,
as it does at intervals, we wait resignedly until the darkness lifts,
and until we may resume our vivid interests again.

I do not, of course, mean that it should be a steady, melancholy
preoccupation. If we have to die, we are also meant to live; but we
ought to combine and co-ordinate the thought of it. It ought to take
its place among the other great certainties of life, without weakening
our hold upon the activity of existence. How is this possible? For the
very terror of death lies not in the sad accidents of mortality, the
stiffened and corrupting form, the dim eye, the dreadful
pageantry--over that we can triumph; but it is the blank cessation of
all that we know of life, the silence of the mind that loved us, the
irreparable wound.

Some turn hungrily to Spiritualism to escape from this terrible
mystery. But, so f