Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:

How the world is made for each of us!
. . . . . . . . . . .
And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan.
Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of the Apologia:

`My argument was ... that absolute certitude as to the truths of natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities ... that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty might create a mental certitude.'

The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:

Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?
He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom with the short face, the genial Spectator:

`When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow.'

And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:

Teach me to live, that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Teach me to die ...
He did not wake till morning. The ghostly past seemed to have gone, and everything spoke of to-day. He started up in bed, thinking he had overslept himself and then said:

`By Jove - I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that she's here all the time! ... and my old schoolmaster, too.' His words about his schoolmaster had, perhaps, less zest in them than his words concerning his cousin.


  By PanEris using Melati.

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