Here the art of the poet lies in the boldness with which he seizes upon one of the most subtle and startling effects of contrast. In the very circumstance which to the ancient mind was the acme of humiliation and horror his genius discerns the occasion for most exalted panegyric, the bitterness of death is lost in the abounding triumph of the soul enlarged and set free, the attributes of woe are transformed into crowning glories. It is just in this spirit of the Modenese poet that mankind has sought to take away from death its sting, from the grave its victory. That solemn moment in which, for those who have gone before and for us who are to follow, the eye of sense beholds naught save the ending of the world, the entrance upon a black and silent eternity, the eye of faith declares to be the supreme moment of a new birth for the disenthralled soul, the introduction to a new era of life compared with which the present one is not worthy of the name. Τίς δ’ οἶδεν, exclaims Euripides, Τίς δ’ οἶδέν εἰ τὸ ζῇν μέν ἐστι κατθανεῖν, Τὸ κατθανεῖν δὲ ζῇν; Who can tell but that this which we call life is really death, from which what we call death is an awakening? From this vantage ground of thought the human soul comes to look without dread upon the termination of this terrestrial existence. The failure of the bodily powers, the stoppage of the fluttering pulse, the cold stillness upon the features so lately wreathed in smiles of merriment, the corruption of the tomb, the breaking of the ties of love, the loss of all that has given value to existence, the dull blankness of irremediable sorrow, the knell of everlasting farewells,--all this is seized upon by the sovereign imagination of man and transformed into a scene of transcending glory, such as in all the vast career of the universe is reserved for humanity alone. In the highest of creatures the Divine immanence has acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the flesh and assert an individuality untrammelled by the limitations which in the present life everywhere persistently surround it. Upon this view death is not a calamity but a boon, not a punishment inflicted upon Man, but the supreme manifestation of his exceptional prerogative as chief among God's creatures. Thus the faith in immortal life is the great poetic achievement of the human mind, it is all-pervasive, it is concerned with every moment and every aspect of our existence as moral individuals, and it is the one thing that makes this world inhabitable for beings constructed like ourselves. The destruction of this sublime poetic conception would be like depriving a planet of its atmosphere; it would leave nothing but a moral desert as cold and dead as the savage surface of the moon.