For though the ceaseless conflict between death and love has brought to the aid of mankind in this age, as in all ages, a host of comforters who, whether by religion or by philosophy, have made light of the terrors of the grave, they have as yet failed to supply the solace for which mankind has long looked and is still looking. They profess to remove “the sting of death,” but leave its real bitterness--the sundering of lover from lover, friend from friend--unmitigated and untouched. Death is the eternal foe of love; and it is just because it is the foe of love, not only because it is the foe of life, that it is properly and naturally dreaded. Its sting lies not in the mortality, but in the separation. A lover, a friend, a relative, grieves, not because the loved one is mortal, still less because he himself is mortal, but because they two will meet no more in the relation in which they have stood to each other. They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed. I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky. It is useless to surmise, or to assert, that the spirit passes, after death, into other spheres of activity or of happiness; for, even if there were proof of this, it would in no way lessen the grief of those who are bereaved of the actual. It was long ago pointed out by Lucretius that even a renewed physical life would in any case be so different from the present life that it could not be justly regarded as in any true sense a continuance of it: Nor yet, if time our scattered dust re-blend, And after death upbuild the flesh again-- Yea, and our light of life arise re-lit-- Can such new birth concern the Self one whit, When once dark death has severed memory’s chain?[45] In like manner a future spiritual life could never compensate for the severance of love in _this_ life; for it is of the very essence of love to desire, not similar things, nor as good things, nor even better things, but the same things. As Richard Jefferies wrote: “I do not want change; I want the same old and loved things, the same wild flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green: the turtle-doves, the blackbirds, ... and I want them in the same place.” And what is true of the nature-lover is not less true of the human-lover, be he parent, or brother, or husband, or friend. It is not a solace but a mockery of such passionate affection to assert that it can be compensated for its disruption in the present by a new but changed condition in the future. A recognition of this truth may be seen in Thomas Hardy’s poem, “He Prefers Her Earthly”: ... Well, shall I say it plain? I would not have you thus and there, But still would grieve on, missing you, still feature You as the one you were.