Wealth, station, honor, health, happiness, youth, beauty, love--today; and the tomb tomorrow! This contrast has ever most forcefully appealed to the human heart. Bossuet knew full well the force of this appeal and again the orator and the occasion were well met. “O vanity,” he exclaimed, “O nothingness! O mortals, ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago would she have believed it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was shedding so many tears in this place, while I was discharging a like office for the Queen, her mother--that she would so soon assemble you here to deplore her own loss? ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Nothing is left for me to say but that that is the only sentiment which, in presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well grounded and so poignant permits me to indulge. No; after what we have just seen, health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and pleasures are but a dangerous diversion.” REFLECTIONS. “Keep cool, it will be all one in a hundred years.” So we say to others, so we try to persuade ourselves; but the tempestuous teapot seems fatally fixed over the live coals of life and the teapot tempest must as fatally follow. So mightily important, so imperative, so irresistibly puissant where those seeming geyser-forces in their day; perhaps we who laugh at their spent spray would more wisely learn the lessons they may teach us. But just as a matter of spent spray and evanishing iridescence, those struggles of the long ago seem magically beautiful; and the men and women who figured prominently in them seem to peer through the mist even as flame-light from which flame has fled, even as pictured pain, reflex sorrows, unrealities--spray-shrouded, color-clouded. Cleopatra, nobly dead, a Queen forever; ugly old Socrates growing humanly dear and beautiful to all the ages as he drinks the poison-hemlock; Marie Antoinette, in the tumbrel, at the guillotine, under the glittering blade; Charles I. upon the scaffold, on the block awaiting the headsman’s blow--these things have been, but now they are not; yet they endure. CHAPTER XIII. BLENHEIM Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet--somehow these names lie contiguous in the mind; so stored away, perhaps, in the brain cells long ago, and thus forever associative. Where is all that we know when it is not in play upon the plane of consciousness? Where is the music of a Rachmaninoff--while he sleeps? the reminiscent wealth of a Gladstone--while he plays with his great grandchild? the genius of an Edgar Allan Poe--while narcotic night silences the streets of Baltimore? “Potentially down in subconsciousness,” says my glib psychologist. Eloquent answer! But where and what _is_ subconsciousness?