We can go further, and from the one build up the army of those who have lived, of those alive, of those who will live after us: and these unknown shadows press about our familiar faces, flutter and crowd in and out of the stage-properties of our own existence--like dead leaves in the autumn winds. Particular shapes haunt us with disquieting persistency. We find ourselves in streets, or at shows, or in public parks in the midst of a mob of people whom we do not know, but who live beside us; and we hear them speaking, and can picture to ourselves what they care about. They are of all ages, old and young, men, women, children, black-eyed, blue-eyed, grey-eyed, with fair or dark hair or hair withered white, full-lipped, or with lips shrivelled by passing time; but all of them are living, are there, glad or sorry, before our eyes. An idea takes possession of us and strengthens in us till we tremble with it. We think--"All these individuals about us, whom we could touch as they move, and whom we know to have feelings and hopes and preoccupations, all these beings are destined to disappear one day, whatever they do, wherever they may be, no matter how strong, how well-founded, how firm. In a hundred years they will just have existed, will be nowhere discoverable. What will have become of them?" And again we see the cold, forbidding cemeteries, with the ranked and serried silent tombs all shut fast among their flowers. We shiver at the thought that there, under the cover-stones, beneath the turf, below thick layers of soil, are only blanched bones scattered through that dark which makes us tremble with the notion that it is in some strange fashion our enemy. Such is the common mistake of reason when imagination has taken charge of a mind; and in combating it we must first distinguish between its cause and its effects. These shadows which we fear only have power upon us after we have irrevocably ceased to exist. It is not the darkness which destroys us; on the contrary, it is profoundly creative, doing its work, with that odd prudishness of creation, by choice out of sight.