anza appear
like a bravado, the result of spleen, a feeling that made him suffer,
and which he speedily threw aside. For he wrote, at the same time, the
stanza upon the death of a friend, whom he _hopes to see again in the
land of souls_, and afterward, the elegies to Thyrza, which are full of
_faith in immortality_. At thirty, writing some philosophical
reflections in his memorandum-book, he says: "One can not doubt the
immortality of the soul."

And, elsewhere, he also says that Christianity appears to him
essentially founded on the immateriality of the soul, and that, for this
reason, the Christian materialism of Priestley had always struck him as
being a deadly sort of doctrine. "Believe, if you please," added he, "in
the material resurrection of the body, but not without a soul: it would
be cruel indeed, if, after having had a soul in this world (and our
mind, by whatever name you call it, is really a soul), we were to be
separated from it in the other, even for material immortality! I confess
my partiality for mind."

Alluding to the systems of philosophy that do not admit creation
according to Genesis, he says, that "even if we could get rid of Adam
and Eve, of the apple and the serpent, we should not know what to put in
their place; that the difficulty would not be overcome; that things must
have had a beginning, it matters not when and how; that creation must
have had an origin and a Creator. For creation is much more natural and
easy to imagine than a concurrence of atoms; that all things may be
traced to their sources even though they end by emptying themselves into
an ocean."

We have seen what he said to Parry upon religion[69] and its ministers,
upon God Almighty and the hope of enjoying eternal life, only a few
weeks before his glorious death.

And when the hand of death was already upon him, a few moments before
his agony, did he not say that eternity and space were already before
his eyes, but that on this point, thanks to God, _he was happy and
tranquil?_ that the thought of living _eternally_, of living another
life, was a great consolation to him? that Christianity was the purest
and most liberal of all religions (although a little spoiled by the
ministers of Christ, often the worst enemies of its liberal and
charitable doctrines); but that, as to the questions depending on these
doctrines, and which God alone, all powerful, can determine, in Him
alone did he wish to rest?

But if Lord Byron w