His spending has no end.
Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the
bells. There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we
can hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall
get through it. We shall not “get through it,” of course, but speech is
only fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have
had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror
of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose
love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this
perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of
happy awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not
being. I can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
To dream as I may,
And awake when I will,
With the song of the bird,
And the sun on the hill.
Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in
which, once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, “Are you there,
beloved?” and hear the reply, “Yes, beloved, I am here,” and with
that sweet assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The
tenderness and beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred
Austin, whom some one in a jest made Poet Laureate. “For my part,” he
said, “I should like to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of
another victory for the British Empire.” It would not be easy to invent
a more perfect contrast between the feeling of a poet and the simulated
passion of a professional patriot. He did not really think that, of
course. He was simply a timid, amiable little man who thought it was
heroic and patriotic to think that. He had so habituated his tiny talent
to strutting about in the grotesque disguise of a swashbuckler that it
had lost all touch with the primal emotions of poetry. Forgive me for
intruding him upon the theme. The happy awakenings of eternity
must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings and its vulgar
patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to sleep on.
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