The man who loved his life so over much,
Shall sleep in my Urn. . . It is so horrible."

He imagines in his need some future state may be revealed by Zeus.

"Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
To seek which the joy hunger forces us:"

He speculates that this life may have been made straight, "to make
sweet the life at large."

And that we are: "freed by the throbbing impulse we call Death." But
he ends by fearing that were it possible Zeus must have revealed it.

This passionate pathetic longing for joy, and life beyond death finds
an echo in many hearts, which yet can admire the grand altruism of
"The Pilgrims" and the selfless spirit of the Impersonal Martyr. After
considering all this clash of thought, it seems as if it all resolved
itself into the individual temperament which settles and modifies and
adapts to itself the forms of our philosophies and religions, our
Hopes and Faiths, and Despairs.

For from whence comes the real power thinkers possess over us? It is
not in their forms of thought, as Matthew Arnold said most truly, but
in the tendencies, in the spirit which led them to adopt those
formulas. Every thinker has some secret, an exact object at which he
aims, which is "the cause of all his work, and the reason of his
attraction" to some readers, and his repulsion to others.