Mysterious complexity of our mortal nature and estate that we should so desire to be remembered after death, though born to be forgotten! Our words and deeds, the influences of our silent personalities, do indeed pass from us into the long history of the race and abide for the rest of time: so that an earthly immortality is the heritage, nay, the inalienable necessity, of even the commonest lives; only it is an immortality not of self, but of its good and evil. For Nature sows us and reaps us, that she may gather a harvest, not of us, but from us. It is God alone that gathers the harvest of us. And well for us that our destiny should be that general forgetfulness we so strangely shrink from. For no sooner are we gone hence than, even for such brief times as our memories may endure, we are apt to grow by processes of accumulative transformation into what we never were. Thou kind, kind fate, therefore--never enough named and celebrated--that biddest the sun of memory rise on our finished but imperfect lives, and then lengthenest or shortenest the little day of posthumous reminiscence, according as thou seest there is need of early twilight or of deeper shadows! * * * * * Years passed. City and cemetery were each grown vaster. It was again an afternoon when the people strolled among the graves and monuments. An old man had courteously attached himself to a group that stood around a crumbling memorial. He had reached a great age; but his figure was erect, his face animated by strong emotions, and his eyes burned beneath his brows. "Sirs," said he, interposing in the conversation, which turned wholly on the monument, "you say nothing of him in whose honor it was erected." "We say nothing because we know nothing." "Is he then wholly forgotten?" "We are not aware that he is at all remembered." "The inscription reads: 'He was a poet.' Know you none of his poems?" "We have never so much as heard of his poems." "My eyes are dim; is there nothing carved beneath his name?" One of the by-standers went up and knelt down close to the base. "There _was_ something here, but it is effaced by time--Wait!" And tracing his finger slowly along, he read like a child: "He--asked--but--for--the--common--lot. "That is all," he cried, springing lightly up. "Oh, the dust on my knees!" he added with vexation. "He may have sung very sweetly," pursued the old man. "He may, indeed!" they answered, carelessly. "But, sirs," continued he, with a sad smile, "perhaps you are the very generation that he looked to for the fame which his own denied him; perhaps he died believing that _you_ would fully appreciate his poems." "If so, it was a comfortable faith to die in," they said, laughing, in return. "He will never know that we did not. A few great poets have posthumous fame: we know _them_ well enough." And they passed on.