After each individual death the earth retains each individual clay to be used again and again; and, as far as I can see, it rains back each individual essence to the sun--or somewhere near it--like a precious water-drop returned to the sea, where it mingles, after having been about and seen something of the world, and learned the use of five small wits--and remembering all! Yes, like that poor little exiled wandering water-drop in the pretty song your father used to sing, and which always manages to find its home at last-- _'Va passaggier' in fiume, Va prigionier' in fonte, Ma sempre ritorn' al mar.'_ Or else it is as if little grains of salt were being showered into the Mare d'Auteuil, to melt and mingle with the water and each other till the Mare d'Auteuil itself was as salt as salt can be. Not till that Mare d'Auteuil of the sun is saturated with the salt of the earth, of earthly life and knowledge, will the purpose be complete, and then old mother earth may well dry up into a cinder like the moon; its occupation will be gone, like hers--'adieu, panier, les vendanges sont faites!' And, as for the sun and its surrounding ocean of life--ah, that is beyond _me_! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever. * * * * * You must understand that it is not a bit like an ocean, nor a bit like water-drops, or grains of salt, or specks of spinal marrow; but it is only by such poor metaphors that I can give you a glimpse of what I mean, since you can no longer understand me, as you used to do on earthly things, by the mere touch of our hands. * * * * * Gogo, I am the only little water-drop, the one grain of salt that has not yet been able to dissolve and melt away in that universal sea; I am the exception. It is as though a long, invisible chain bound me still to the earth, and I were hung at the other end of it in a little transparent locket, a kind of cage, which lets me see and hear things all round, but keeps me from melting away. And soon I found that this locket was made of that half of you that is still in me, so that I couldn't dissolve, because half of me wasn't dead at all; for the chain linked me to that half of myself I had left in you, so that half of me actually wasn't there to be dissolved.... I am getting rather mixed! But oh, my heart's true love, how I hugged my chain, with you at the other end of it! With such pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning. Such love as mine is stronger then death indeed! * * * * *