creatures breathing thoughtful breath. As has already been said, death takes away the commonplace of life. And positively, when one looks on the thousand and one poor, foolish, ignoble faces of this world, and listens to the chatter as poor and foolish as the faces, one, in order to have any proper respect for them, is forced to remember that solemnity of death, which is silently waiting. The foolishest person will look grand enough one day. The features are poor now, but the hottest tears and the most passionate embraces will not seem out of place _then_. If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death. The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are gone away forever, and the features settle back into a marble calm, which is the man's truest image. Then the most affected look sincere, the most volatile, serious--all noble, more or less. And nature will not be surprised into disclosures. The man stretched out there may have been voluble as a swallow, but now--when he could speak to some purpose--neither pyramid nor sphinx holds a secret more tenaciously. Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty and elevates happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and that melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leaf brings out the wan loveliness of the primrose. The spectator enjoys the beauty, but his knowledge that _it_ is fleeting, and that _he_ fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something the beautiful object and the gazer are alike raised.