hardly believe that Zenobia was now the same person before whom I had in
the morning, with no little agitation, prostrated myself, after the manner
of the Persian ceremonial. She seemed rather like a friend whom I both
loved and revered. The majesty of the Queen was gone; there remained only
the native dignity of beauty, and goodness, and intellect, which, though
it inspires reverence, yet is there nothing slavish in the feeling. It
differs in degree only from that sentiment which we entertain toward the
gods; it raises rather than depresses.

'We were speaking,' said Julia, resuming the subject which had engaged us,
'of life and of man--how unsatisfactory life is, and how imperfect and
unfinished, as it were, man; and we agreed, I believe, in the opinion,
that there can be no true happiness, without a certain assurance of
immortality, and this we are without.'

'I agree with you,' said Longinus, 'in all that you can have expressed
concerning the unsatisfactoriness of life, regarded as a finite existence,
and concerning the want of harmony there is between man and the other
works of God, if he is mortal; and in this also, that without the
assurance of immortality, there can, to the thinking mind, be no true
felicity. I only wonder that on the last point there should exist in the
mind of any one of you doubts so serious as to give you much disturbance.
I cannot, indeed, feel so secure of a future and then unending existence,
as I am sure that I live now. What I am now I know; concerning the future,
I can only believe, and belief can never possess the certainty of
knowledge. Still, of a future life I entertain no doubts that distress me.
My belief in it is as clear and strong as I can well conceive belief in
things invisible and unexperienced to be. It is such as makes me happy in
any thought or prospect of death. Without it, and life would appear to me
like nothing more to be esteemed than a short, and often troubled or