and light, from the Giver of soul, wherever the heart is afflicted, the
mind is obscured.

Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me: "What mourner can be consoled, if
the Dead die forever?" Through every pulse of my frame throbbed that
dread question. All Nature around seemed to murmur it. And suddenly, as
by a flash from heaven, the grand truth in Faber's grand reasoning shone
on me, and lighted up all, within and without. Alan alone, of all earthly
creatures, asks, "Can the Dead die forever?" and the instinct that urges
the question is God's answer to man! No instinct is given in vain.

And born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the soul
from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent that
foams towards the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far aloft
from the Ocean.

"Know thyself," said the Pythian of old. "That precept descended from
Heaven." Know thyself! Is that maxim wise? If so, know thy soul. But
never yet did man come to the thorough conviction of soul but what he
acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer. In my awe, in my rapture,
all my thoughts seemed enlarged and illumined and exalted. I prayed,--all
my soul seemed one prayer. All my past, with its pride and presumption
and folly, grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling for pardon
before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine. And, sure now,
in the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself, that the Dead do not die
forever, my human love soared beyond its brief trial of terror and sorrow.
Daring not to ask from Heaven's wisdom that Lilian, for my sake, might not
yet pass away from the earth, I prayed that my soul might be fitted to
bear with submission whatever my Maker might ordain. And if surviving
her--without whom no beam from yon material sun could ever warm into joy a