nevertheless, there is a certain essence common to them all, and
persisting unchanged through them all, and that this is the soul of
the individual? But such an essence as should be the same in the babe
and the man, the youth and the dotard, could be nothing more than a
colourless abstraction, without distinctive qualities of any kind--a
mere principle of life like the fabled jelly protoplasm. Such a fancy
reduces the hope of immortality to an absurdity.

"No! no! It is not any such grotesque or fragmentary immortality that God
has given us. The Creator does not administer the universe on so
niggardly a plan. Either there is no immortality for us which is
intelligible or satisfying, or childhood, youth, manhood, age, and all
the other persons who make up an individual, live for ever, and one day
will meet and be together in God's eternal present; and when the several
souls of an individual are in harmony no doubt He will perfect their
felicity by joining them with a tie that shall be incomparably more
tender and intimate than any earthly union ever dreamed of, constituting
a life one yet manifold--a harp of many strings, not struck successively
as here on earth, but blending in rich accord.

"And now I beg you not to suppose that what I have tried to demonstrate
is any hasty or ill-considered fancy. It was, indeed, at first but a
dream with which the eyes of my sweet mistress inspired me, but from a
dream it has grown into a belief, and in these last months into a
conviction which I am sure nothing can shake. If you can share it the
long mourning of your life will be at an end. For my own part I could
never return to the old way of thinking without relapsing into
unutterable despair. To do so would be virtually to give up faith in any
immortality at all worth speaking of. For it is the long procession of
our past selves, each with its own peculiar charm and incommunicable