Is this then the best consolation my mysterious mentor can offer? How vain, how false it is!--how little can reason help us! The small bird exists only in the present; there is no past, nor future, nor knowledge of death. Its every action is the result of a stimulus from outside; its "bravery" is but that of a dead leaf or ball of thistle-down carried away by the blast. Is there no escape, then, from this intolerable sadness--from the thought of springs that have been, the beautiful multitudinous life that has vanished? Our maker and mother mocks at our efforts--at our philosophic refuges, and sweeps them away with a wave of emotion. And yet there is deliverance, the old way of escape which is ours, whether we want it or not. Nature herself in her own good time heals the wound she inflicts--even this most grievous in seeming when she takes away from us the faith and hope of reunion with our lost. They may be in a world of light, waiting our coming--we do not know; but in that place they are unimaginable, their state inconceivable. They were like us, beings of flesh and blood, or we should not have loved them. If we cannot grasp their hands their continued existence is nothing to us. Grief at their loss is just as great for those who have kept their faith as for those who have lost it; and on account of its very poignancy it cannot endure in either case. It fades, returning in its old intensity at ever longer intervals until it ceases. The poet of nature was wrong when he said that without his faith in the decay of his senses he would be worse than dead, echoing the apostle who said that if we had hope in this world only we should be of all men the most miserable. So, too, was the later poet wrong when he listened to the waves on Dover beach bringing the eternal notes of sadness in; when he saw in imagination the ebbing of the great sea of faith which had made the world so beautiful, in its withdrawal disclosing the deserts drear and naked shingles of the world. That desolation, as he imagined it, which made him so unutterably sad, was due to the erroneous idea that our earthly happiness comes to us from otherwhere, some region outside our planet, just as one of our modern philosophers has imagined that the principle of life on earth came originally from the stars.