"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life. 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, He has outsoared the shadows of our night. Envy and calumny, and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again. From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown gray, in vain--" Most men, however, decline to believe that "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." [6] According to the more general view death frees the soul from the encumbrance of the spirit, and summons us to the seat of judgment. In fact, "There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death." [7] We have bodies, "we are spirits." "I am a soul," said Epictetus, "dragging about a corpse." The body is the mere perishable form of the immortal essence. Plato concluded that if the ways of God are to be justified, there must be a future life. To the aged in either case death is a release. The Bible dwells most forcibly on the blessing of peace. "My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you." Heaven is described as a place where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. But I suppose every one must have asked himself in what can the pleasures of heaven consist. "For all we know Of what the blessed do above Is that they sing, and that they love." [8] It would indeed accord with few men's ideal that there should be any "struggle for existence" in heaven. We should then be little better off than we are now. This world is very beautiful, if we could only enjoy it in peace. And yet mere passive existence--mere vegetation--would in itself offer few attractions. It would indeed be almost intolerable. Again, the anxiety of change seems inconsistent with perfect happiness; and yet a wearisome, interminable monotony, the same thing over and over again forever and ever without relief or variety, suggests dulness rather than bliss. I feel that to me, said Greg, "God has promised not the heaven of the ascetic temper, or the dogmatic theologian, or of the subtle mystic, or of the stern martyr ready alike to inflict and bear; but a heaven of purified and permanent affections--of a book of knowledge with eternal leaves, and unbounded capacities to read it--of those we love ever round us, never misconceiving us, or being harassed by us--of glorious work to do, and adequate faculties to do it--a world of solved problems, as well as of realized ideals." "For still the doubt came back,--Can God provide For the large heart of man what shall not pall, Nor through eternal ages' endless tide On tired spirits fall?