effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to entertain no
longer the question of our right to be.

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying will
get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay.
He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct;
it may be, some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but
upon the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's son
and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father. That life
which began so small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into
the lives of others. It is not indispensable; another will take the
place and shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better the
man and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to
regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his
personality. To have lived a generation is not only to have grown at
home in that perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable
duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base,
something of the air of a betrayal. A man does not only reflect upon
what he might have done in a future that is never to be his; but
beholding himself so early a deserter from the fight, he eats his
heart for the good he might have done already. To have been so
useless and now to lose all hope of being useful any more--there it
is that death and memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go on,
founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily
from strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his
friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how shall
this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which was his only
business in this world, which was so fitfully pursued, and which is
now so ineffectively to end?

V

AES TRIPLEX

The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and
so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands
alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes
all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps
suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular
siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when
the business is done, there is sore havoc m