But this, it may be said, is to set love in rebellion against not death only, but the very laws of life. There is truth in such censure; and wisest is he who can so reconcile his longings with his destiny as to know enough of the sweetness of love without too much of the bitterness of regret. Perhaps, in some fairer society of a future age, when love is more generally shared, the sting of death will be less acute; but what centuries have yet to pass before that “Golden City” of which John Barlas sang can be realized? There gorgeous Plato’s spirit Hangs brooding like a dove, And all men born inherit Love free as gods above; There each one is to other A sister or a brother, A father or a mother, A lover or a love. Meantime it would almost seem that to the religious folk who assume a perpetuity of individual life, the thought of death sometimes becomes less solemn, less sacred, than it is to those who have no supernatural beliefs. The easy assurance of immortality to which friends who are writing letters of condolence to a mourner too often have recourse, is usually a sign less of sympathy than of the lack of it; for it is not sympathetic to repeat ancient formulas in face of a present and very real grief; indeed, it is in many cases an impertinence, when it is done without any regard to the views of the person to whom such solace is addressed. Among the professional ghouls who watch the death-notices in the papers, none, perhaps, are more callous--not even the would-be buyers of old clothes or artificial teeth--than the pious busybodies who intrude on homes of sorrow with their vacant tracts and booklets. Nay, worse: nowadays mourners are lucky if some spiritist acquaintance does not have a beatific vision of the lost one; for the dead seem to be regarded as a lawful prey by any one who sees visions and dreams dreams, and who is determined to call them as witnesses that there is no reality in the most stringent ordinances of nature: Stern law of every mortal lot; Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, And builds himself I know not what Of second life I know not where. With much appropriateness did Matthew Arnold introduce his trenchant rebuke of human arrogance into a poem on the grave of a dog; for mankind has neither right nor reason to presume for itself an hereafter which it denies to humbler fellow-beings who share at least the ability to suffer and to love. Can any one, not a mere barbarian, who has watched the death of an animal whom he loved, and by whom he was himself loved with that faithful affection which is never withheld when it is merited, dare to doubt that the conditions of life and death are essentially the same for human and for non-human? Is an animal’s death one whit less poignant in remembrance than that of one’s dearest human friend? Must it not remain with us as ineffaceably?