one of his _aquarelles_. A son, fleeing from the lava which is rapidly
streaming toward the sea, is carrying his aged father on his back.
When there is only a narrow strip of land left between the devouring
elements, the father bids the son put him down, so that the son may
save himself by flight, as otherwise both will be lost. The son obeys,
and as he goes casts a glance of farewell on his father. This is the
moment depicted. The historical circumstance which Scott represents
in his masterly way in _The Heart of Midlothian_, chap, ii., is of a
precisely similar kind; where, of two delinquents condemned to death,
the one who by his awkwardness caused the capture of the other happily
sets him free in the chapel by overpowering the guard after the
execution-sermon, without at the same time making any attempt on his
own behalf. Nay, in the same category must also be placed the scene
which is represented in a common engraving, which may perhaps be
objectionable to western readers--I mean the one in which a soldier,
kneeling to be shot, is trying by waving a cloth to frighten away his
dog who wants to come to him.

In all these cases we see an individual in the face of his own
immediate and certain destruction no longer thinking of saving
himself, so that he may direct the whole of his efforts to saving some
one else. How could there be a clearer expression of the consciousness
that what is being destroyed is only a phenomenon, and that the
destruction itself is only a phenomenon; that, on the other hand, the
real being of the man who meets his death is untouched by that event,
and lives on in the other man, in whom even now, as his action
betrays, he so clearly perceives it to exist? For if this were not so,
and it was his real being which was about to be annihilated, how could
that being spend its last efforts in showing such an ardent sympathy
in the welfare and continued existence of another?