But meantime life on this earth implies warmth and carries warmth: that at least we positively have found out though without knowing what warmth is. Every living terrestrial creature is a candle, is a lamp. The rose is a perfumed lamp and when its bowl is without oil, that inimitable lamp so silently built to give off for a little while a few serene rays of vestal beauty as silently falls to pieces. The pine tree is a wild candle poised on a mountain table. The eagle is a winged candle burning to cinders on a peak of air. The albatross is a floating conflagration with all the ineffectual sea drenching its back and breast. The polar bear is a four-branch candle in a candlestick of snow. We human beings are laughing and tear-dripping candles, descending swiftly to our sockets. The sun and the stars are candles, whirling golden candles in the night of the universe, a long, long night. One by one they too burn down at those brief intervals which we with our puny measurements call ages. The whole myriad-lighted starry infinite, as far as we know, is a mere ballroom arranged for somebody’s pleasure, somebody’s dancing. The candles may last as long as the master of the revels requires them; and then perhaps at some strange daybreak of which we can conceive naught, they will go out to the final one--all go out at the coming-on of day. A strange day indeed without any suns, without any stars, these having been consumed during the ancient night. What our human race has always most wished to know, most liked to believe, is that Nature, the whole universe of Nature, is itself but a troubled night of being; and that when Nature has come to some kind of end, the night of existence will have come to an end also. Beyond will have to be some kind of day, endless day. Our human race has always believed or has tried to believe that on the Natureward confines of that day it will be discovered, assembled there, waiting there, having journeyed thither somehow: no matter how, so it arrive. For however dull and petty man may be, however despicable, brutish, abandoned, there has been no lack of sublimity in his vision, in his faith, of what he is to be: that after the last star has gone out in the night of Nature, the orb of his soul will have but begun to flash the immortality of its dawn.