ch they are still
palpitating in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life
consist--their own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun
his true life till a hundred years or so after he was dead and
buried? His physical life was but as an embryonic stage, a coming
up out of darkness, a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that
life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter. We all
live for a while after we are gone hence, but we are for the most
part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as regards that life
which every age and country has recognized as higher and truer than
the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the race is
larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than that
of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more
important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere
perhaps more plainly than in the case of great teachers, who often
in the lives of their pupils produce an effect that reaches far
beyond anything produced while their single lives were yet
unsupplemented by those other lives into which they infused their
own.

Death to such people is the ending of a short life, but it does not
touch the life they are already living in those whom they have
taught; and happily, as none can know when he shall die, so none can
make sure that he too shall not live long beyond the grave; for the
life after death is like money before it--no one can be sure that it
may not fall to him or her even at the eleventh hour. Money and
immortality come in such odd unaccountable ways that no one is cut
off from hope. We may not have made either of them for ourselves,
but yet another may give them to us in virtue of his or her love,
which shall illumine us for ever, and establish us in some heavenly
mansion whereof we neither dreamed nor shall ever dream. Look at
the Doge Loredano Loredani, the old man's smile upon whose face has
been reproduced so faithfully in so many lands that it can never
henceforth be forgotten--would he have had one hundredth part of the
life he now lives had he not been linked awhile with one of those
heaven-sent men who know che cosa e amor? Look at Rembrandt's old
woman in our National Gallery; had she died before she was eighty-
three years old she would not have been living now. Then, when she
was eighty-three, immortality perched upon her as a bird on a
withered bough.

I seem to hear someone