The poets of all times and climes have had something to say of old age, and vastly more of death. The latter has always been one of the chief themes of Christian hymnology and both its gruesome horrors and its consolations have found expression in countless tropes--sleep, harvest, crossing the river, and many others that are fairly burned into the consciousness of all who have come into contact with the church. Hymns have given the Western world ideas of death that the scientific descriptions of it show to be utterly false to fact, for the dying almost never face death consciously, so that its terrors are generally quite unknown to those who meet it; while the cajolements that the Great Enemy has really been conquered in his stronghold and the supreme fear of the world banished, which, as I have elsewhere shown,[109] came to its most ecstatic affirmation at Pentecost, are no less fallacious. Thus along with its anodyne Christianity has invested death with a new horror of hell unknown to the pagan world. Moreover, it has always been taught as something exogenous or as a graft upon a more primitive stock and it is the latter that the psychologist chiefly seeks to know. Thus, excluding the more artificial reactions that have come to it from this source, I have reduced my first numerous selections to a very few that express the natural spontaneous repercussion of the three chief attitudes of mind regarding it. The first is the death thought that always and everywhere tends to find its first expression in ingenuous youth and this has never been more fully and normally portrayed than in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,”[110] which is familiar even to school children and which was written by the author in his ripe adolescence. This might have been composed in ancient pagan Hellas or even by a Buddhist as well as by a Christian, so generic and germane is it to human nature as it evolves. Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,”[111] while it shows vestiges of the same youthful _aperçus_ that lingered into the author’s maturer years, is far more specific, more funereal, and really the farewell address of a dying soul to survivors. The euthanasia motive is far less pronounced in it.