* * * * * How small is your grief if you measure it by the standards of the universe! Look up at the calm and silent stars; they are billions of miles away. Notice that piece of sandstone; fifty million years have passed since the primeval tide washed its grains together. Is there not something in such thoughts that makes you a little ashamed of the preoccupation of your mind with its petty present cares? * * * * * Do you reflect sometimes that you are but one of fifteen hundred millions of human beings, fifty millions of whom die every year? Is it worth while passing your invisibly small share of life in worrying about trifles? * * * * * The only malady all covet is the only one which is absolutely fatal,――old age. * * * * * Death is the most and the least feared of any event. Seven of my most intimate friends committed suicide for various reasons, all good enough in their opinions. “No passion is so weak,” remarks Bacon, “but that a little pushed it will master the fear of death.” * * * * * The visits of death seem always inopportune. Dickens tells of a visit he paid to an Old Man’s Home. He found that, in the opinion of the inmates, every old man died prematurely. They invariably said, “He brought it on hisself.” * * * * * He who is haunted by the dread of dying makes himself miserable for fear he cannot make himself miserable longer. * * * * * When death is natural, that is, in extreme old age, it is neither feared nor felt. That it is so little a thing when natural, suggests that at all times we may deem it too great. * * * * * If we understood Death, we should no longer care for Life. II. _The Inseparable Connection of Pleasure and Pain._ The hard and strange lesson that I would teach in this chapter is, that dreams of unalloyed bliss are not merely fanciful, they are impossible of realization under any known conditions of life; that pleasure requires pain, joy demands sorrow, as the very condition of its existence; and that these pairs are inseparable twins, the presence of one being bound up in that of the other. I here promulgate no new discovery in the science of mind, though it has been much overlooked by physiologists, and quite put one side by sanguine optimists in their rosy paintings of the future perfectibility and universal happiness of the human race. More than two thousand years ago Socrates dwelt upon this same uncanny blending of contraries. The jailer, as we are told in the “Phædo,” of Plato, removed the galling iron fetters from the philosopher’s ankles shortly before the cup of hemlock was handed him; and in this brief interval his friends gathered around him for the last farewell.