. And yet the future of this harvest, the continuance of drought
or the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. For
he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of events in which
his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful
for a famine, that did not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, the
equable sufficiency of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all
the disinterested hopes for mankind and a better future which have been
the solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond the
reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes small
difference whether he die five thousand years, or five thousand and
fifty years, before the good epoch for which he faithfully labours. He
has not deceived himself; he has known from the beginning that he
followed the pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself in the
wilderness, and that it was reserved for others to enter joyfully into
possession of the land. And so, as everything grows greyer and quieter
about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions
accompany his sad decline and follow him, with friendly voices and
hopeful words, into the very vestibule of death. The desire of love or
of fame scarcely moved him, in his days of health, more strongly than
these generous aspirations move him now; and so life is carried forward
beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even when his
hands grope already on the face of the impassable.

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends; or
shall we not say rather, that by their thought for him, by their
unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff
of life, beyond the power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thousand
ways will he survive and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie
survived during all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse
with him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much of what was
truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places that knew him no
more, and found no better consolation than the promise of his own
verses, that soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what
it is that we most seek and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in
calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our
decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who
should care more for the outlying coloni