gust them. No terror
startles them. No possible experiment remains untried; nor is
there any unsounded fortune left. No dim marvels and boundless
hopes beckon them with resistless lures into the future. They have
no future. One everlasting now is their all. At last the incessant
repetition of identical phenomena, the unmitigated sameness of
things, the eternal monotony of affairs, become unutterably
burdensome and horrible. Full of loathing and immeasurable
fatigue, a weariness like the weight of a universe oppresses them;
and what would they not give for a change! any thing to break the
nightmare spell of ennui, to fling off the dateless flesh, to
die, to pass into some unguessed realm, to lie down and sleep
forever: it would be the infinite boon!

Take away from man all that is dependent on, or interlinked with,
the appointment of death, and it would make such fundamental
alterations of his constitution and relations that he would no
longer be man. It would leave us an almost wholly different race.
If it is a divine boon that men should be, then death is a good to
us; for it enables us to be men. Without it there would neither be
husband and wife, nor parent and child, nor family hearth and
altar; nor, indeed, would hardly any thing be as it is now. The
existent phenomena of nature and the soul would comprise all. And
when the jaded individual, having mastered and exhausted this
finite sum, looked in vain for any thing new or further, the world
would be a hateful dungeon to him, and life an awful doom; and how
gladly he would give all that lies beneath the sun's golden round
and top of sovereignty to migrate into some untried region and
state of being, or even to renounce existence altogether and lie
down forever in the attractive slumber of the grave! Without
death, mankind would undergo the fate of Sisyphus, no future, and
in the present the oppression of an intolerable task with an
aching vacuum of motive. The certainty and the mystery of death
create the stimulus and the romance of life. Give the human race
an earthly immortality, and you exclude them from every thing
greater and diviner than the earth affords. Who could consent to
that? Take away death, and a brazen wall girds in our narrow life,
against which, if we remained men, we should dash and chafe in the
climax of our miserable longing, as the caged lion or eagle beats
against his bars.

The gift of an earthly immortality conferred on a single person