Among the wills in fiction and poetry, collated by Mr. Harris, in his recent work,[69] are those of Olivia, in Twelfth Night; that of Don Quixote; the wills of Dickens, George Eliot, Dumas and other English writers. But it is not the object of this chapter to deal with wills in fiction, since testaments are founded in certainties, as real as life and death themselves. We have always made our wills in pursuance of a natural inclination, associated with the idea of property and intimately connected with the ties that bind us here on earth. As Hazlitt said, a century ago: “We consign our possessions to our next of kin, as mechanically as we lean our heads on the pillow and go out of the world in the same state of stupid amazement that we came into it.” And as certain as we are to die, so certainly do we owe it to ourselves and to those who are the objects of our bounty, to provide for the proper disposition of our acquisitions, even as the men and women of antiquity did, before they pressed the pillow for the last time. The hands that wrote the wills referred to in the foregoing pages have been stilled with the silence of the centuries, e’en as the fingers that wove the figures in your antique rug; the voice that expressed the dying intent of the testator, like the nightingale that sang among the trees—ah, “whither hath it gone again, who knows” can be heard again no more. Like scattered threads from the warp and woof of the lives from which these skeins are taken, each age-scented document marks the close of a human life and the fact that other lives have fallen, like the leaves from trees, but emphasizes the pathos of our lives, since humanity, as one man, with a universal agony still strives and strains “to gain the goal where agonies shall cease to be.” Streams have been wept into the vast ocean of time since the first will and testament was made by dying man. “A myriad races came and went; this Sphinx hath seen them come and go.” True, a human life, is but “a drop in ocean’s boundless tide,” but as truly said by Burton:[70] “Our deaths are twain; the Deaths we see Drop like the leaves in windy Fall; But ours, our own, are ruined worlds, a globe Collapst, last end of all. We live our lives with rogues and fools, Dead and alive, alive and dead, We die ’twixt one who feels the pulse and One who frets and clouds the head. Hardly we learn to wield the blade, before The wrist grows stiff and old; Hardly we learn to ply the pen, ere Thought And Fancy faint with cold. And still the weaver plies his loom, whose Warp and woof is wretched Man Weaving th’ unpattern’d dark design, so dark We doubt it owns a plan. But ah, what vaileth man to mourn; shall Tears bring forth what smiles ne’er brought; Shall brooding breed a thought of joy? Ah Hush the sigh, forget the thought.