This earthly life can not be the end of all life; it can not be the final word concerning our destinies, unless they are, even in the most favorable cases, to close with an enigmatic deficit, and with an unexplainable divergence between capacity and accomplishment, between task and performance: this must be evident to every one who carefully reflects upon it, to every one who is unwilling to dismiss such questions curtly, unwilling to accept of death as an all-conclusive, comfortless fate. The life of every thinking man who does not believe in its continuance after death, ends, therefore, in deep sadness. The decline of all the powers, bodily and mental, fills the heart that knows no further hope with dejection, and with a terror, at times, that no circumstances of earthly fortune can save him from. Even the consideration that the works of a man survive him, or that “when the body shall fall to dust the great name shall still live on,” gives him no adequate comfort for the passing away of life itself. Some then forcibly rouse themselves and seek in feverish activity to use up the last moments of vanishing existence in making sure that others will have something to remember them by, or feel a momentary regret over their loss. In other aging men, on the other hand, once more there awakens with almost elementary force the long-slumbering desire for pleasure in every direction, seeking again to blow into flame the pitiful spark of the fire of life. The end in both cases, however, is a helpless breaking-down in the face of the constantly approaching Unknown, or the banishment of all thoughts on the subject as far as possible, or finally, in the bravest cases, a stoical surrender to an unavoidable fate--unless there is a _hope_ that life will continue beyond. Only where such hope is present is Death the friendly-earnest messenger who heralds to the tired wanderer the end of his journey and the soon impending prospect, from a slowly and toilsomely mounted hilltop, into a broad new world; for all others he is the ugly skeleton as represented in the mediæval Dance of Death, or at least the inexorable, cruel Reaper of the very beautiful, but very melancholy poem of Clemens Brentano, “There is a reaper whose name is Death.” Now, for the first, there comes to light the most remarkable of all the differences between men; now, at the end of life, the “simple fool” comes to a victorious vindication. For while to all others every autumnal falling leaf awakens the feeling of a hopeless passing away, _he_ sees, even in the tree stripped bare, the buds already of a new and gracious spring, and he hears, in his last days, not only the unalterable judgment of death, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” but at the same time likewise the word of life, “Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” II