that very soon neither his hand nor he himself
would be his own any more. And so we close and clench, not our hand, but
our heart, seeking to clutch the world in it.

A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the full vigour of
physical health the near approach of a violent death, he proposed to
concentrate his life and spend the few days which he calculated still
remained to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities!

If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to
distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the
absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate
befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race
nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness
to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known.

And the remedy is not that suggested in the quatrain that runs--

_Cada vez que considero
que me tengo de morir,
tiendo la capa en el suelo
y no me harto de dormir._[11]

No! The remedy is to consider our mortal destiny without flinching, to
fasten our gaze upon the gaze of the Sphinx, for it is thus that the
malevolence of its spell is discharmed.

If we all die utterly, wherefore does everything exist? Wherefore? It is
the Wherefore of the Sphinx; it is the Wherefore that corrodes the
marrow of the soul; it is the begetter of that anguish which gives us
the love of hope.

Among the poetic laments of the unhappy Cowper there are some lines
written under the oppression of delirium, in which, believing himself to
be the mark of the Divine vengeance, he exclaims--

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter.

This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and
predestination; but read the much more terrible words of Senancour,
expressive of the Catholic, not the Protestant, despair, when he makes
his Obermann say, "L'homme est perissable. Il se peut; mais perissons en
resistant, et, si le neant nous est reserve, ne faisons pas que ce soit
une justice." And I must confess, painful though the confession be, that
in the days of the simple faith of my childhood, descriptions of the
tortures of hell, however terrible, never made me tremble, for I always
felt that nothingness was much more terrifying. He who suffers lives,
and he who lives suffering, even though over the portal of his abode is
written "Abandon all hope!" loves and hopes. It is better to liv