oltaire on
his death-bed; it is a cry of despair worthy of the helpless old atheist.

"But to what purpose? Why so many struggles? Who is there above us who
delights in so much agony? Who amuses himself and wiles away an idle hour
watching this spectacle of creation, always renewed and always dying,
seeing the work of man's hands rising, the grass growing; looking upon
the planting of the seed and the fall of the thunderbolt; beholding man
walking about upon his earth until he meets the beckoning finger of
death; counting tears and watching them dry upon the cheek of pain;
noting the pure profile of love and the wrinkled face of age; seeing
hands stretched up to him in supplication, bodies prostrate before him,
and not a blade of wheat more in the harvest!

"Who is it, then, that has made so much for the pleasure of knowing that
it all amounts to nothing! The earth is dying--Herschel says it is of
cold; who holds in his hand the drop of condensed vapor and watches it as
it dries up, as a fisher watches a grain of sand in his hand? That mighty
law of attraction that suspends the world in space, torments it--and
consumes it in endless desire--every planet that carries its load of
misery and groans on its axle--calls to each other across the abyss, and
each wonders which will stop first. God controls them; they accomplish
assiduously and eternally their appointed and useless task; they whirl
about, they suffer, they burn, they become extinct and they light up with
new flame; they descend and they reascend, they follow and yet they avoid
one another, they interlace like rings; they carry on their surface
thousands of beings who are ceaselessly renewed; the beings move about,
cross one another's paths, clasp one another for an hour, and then fall,
and others rise in their place.

"Where life fails, life hastens to the spot; where air is wanting, air
rushes; no disorder, everything is regulated, marked out, written down in
lines of gold and parables of fire; everything keeps step with the
celestial music along the pitiless paths of life; and all for nothing!
And we, poor nameless dreams, pale and sorrowful apparitions, helpless
ephemera, we who are animated by the breath of a second in order that
death may exist, we exhaust ourselves with fatigue in order to prove that
we are living for a purpose, and that something indefinable is stirring
within us.

"We hesitate to turn against our breasts a little piece of steel, or to