enthusiasm, intermingled as it was with wild, excursive vagaries, "we will
go on as many centuries as we choose. Perhaps,--yet I think not
so,--perhaps, however, in the course of lengthened time, we may find that
the world is the same always, and mankind the same, and all possibilities
of human fortune the same; so that by and by we shall discover that the
same old scenery serves the world's stage in all ages, and that the story
is always the same; yes, and the actors always the same, though none but
we can be aware of it; and that the actors and spectators would grow weary
of it, were they not bathed in forgetful sleep, and so think themselves
new made in each successive lifetime. We may find that the stuff of the
world's drama, and the passions which seem to play in it, have a monotony,
when once we have tried them; that in only once trying them, and viewing
them, we find out their secret, and that afterwards the show is too
superficial to arrest our attention. As dramatists and novelists repeat
their plots, so does man's life repeat itself, and at length grows stale.
This is what, in my desponding moments, I have sometimes suspected. What
to do, if this be so?"

"Nay, that is a serious consideration," replied Sibyl, assuming an air of
mock alarm, "if you really think we shall be tired of life, whether or
no."

"I do not think it, Sibyl," replied Septimius. "By much musing on this
matter, I have convinced myself that man is not capable of debarring
himself utterly from death, since it is evidently a remedy for many evils
that nothing else would cure. This means that we have discovered of
removing death to an indefinite distance is not supernatural; on the
contrary, it is the most natural thing in the world,--the very perfection
of the natural, since it consists in applying the powers and processes of
Nature to the prolongation of the existence of man, her most perfect