We know that they exist and are alive, and the knowledge is of that more certain kind that does not spring from our mentality but is felt in our bodies. The grief we have when sons or daughters or fathers or mothers die is a _physical_ anguish, and is akin to the pains of birth. Some one has been cut off, deceased—cut off from us. Even in a dream to lose one of those _nearest_ to us is to suffer a sort of physical mortification, to weep senselessly, lose control of nerves, and be prostrated. The fact is we are all one. Even the death of some one who is quite remote jars upon the soul. We were talking one evening of death and some one said to me: “... to die and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, —that is what I fear in death. They tell me I am a pagan, but I feel the dead are under the earth. I hate to think of lying in a damp churchyard and decaying all alone, through days and nights and spring rains, summer storms, autumn winds, winter snows. The rain must be terrible for the dead—to be all wet and old like a fallen leaf.” Another said he did not mind the idea of lying under the earth in the rain and changing into mould. It was gentle and restful. And it was beautiful too, for flowers would rise from where the body slept. One recalled the lines: Oh, never blows the rose so red As where some buried Caesar lies; and another, the beautiful lines of Nash: Worms feed on Hector brave, Dust hath closed Helen’s eyes. But to my mind came some words said to me by Algernon Blackwood the first day we met: “You know we all came out of the earth; somehow or other we have got to get back to her. The Earth is not dead, she is living.” * * * * * He was right. And the dead under the earth are in living care. All that is is One and is beautiful. Life and death make a unity. Everything in the world and without it, in the past and in the future, is to me a unity, and I am calm and happy in it. In me, in you, are all the dead—they crowd behind my eyes and look out, one above another’s shoulders like the people at a great spectacle. There are myriads of them—I hold them. In this sense they are under the earth, in that you and I are earth, and they are in us, and look out of us. We are all windows through which there glance at times faces of each of all there ever have been. III THE DESERT AND THE WORLD I A CHAIN OF HAPPENINGS