Myself finds his soul in these companions, who part from him after Grizzlebeard warns Myself, Man, to meditate Death. Then “the mist received them and they had disappeared.” Myself, troubled in spirit, faces the dilemma Everyman faces. Must this humanity, found and achieved in these four, be swallowed up in the mists? Must alienation, “the saddest thing in the world,” claim the soul in the end? Why discover ourselves and then come to realize that we have found an illusion? We cannot come to be ourselves finally unless Death itself die in the end. The Night of the Dead has always been the night of their return, and Belloc implies throughout his closing chapter that this prefigures eventual immortality. He states this more explicitly in an essay from _Hills and the Sea_ that is given over to meditating the meaning of autumn. ... at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year, the desires which if they do not prove at least demand—perhaps remember—our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and old.... The evenings hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security, and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and prepare me for the isolation of the soul. It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of autumn, for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and at its close the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the Dead return.[12] It is only when life is lived close to the senses, and when the intelligence is brought to bear immediately on what is yielded to man through the body, that the paradox of sadness in created beauty can be brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after page of Belloc’s writing, from early youth to old age, is troubled by a deep melancholy, heightened by his profound communion with the things of his world: English inns, old oak—polished and sturdy, rich Burgundy, the sea and ships that sail, the smell of the tides. These loves run through Belloc’s essays as recurrent themes, testifying to a vision, movingly poetic, that is classical in its simplicity. His gaze is rooted in the primal things that have always nourished the human spirit: in the things at hand. Every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have no part I know nothing.[13]