And our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has
a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this
gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will
come when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a
hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne: why should I regret
and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years
hence, in the reign of I cannot tell whom?
When Bickerstaff wrote his Essays I knew nothing of the subjects
of them; nay, much later, and but the other day, as it were, in the
beginning of the reign of George III., when Goldsmith, Johnson, Burke,
used to meet at the Globe, when Garrick was in his glory, and Reynolds
was over head and ears with his portraits, and Sterne brought out the
volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ year by year, it was without consulting me:
I had not the slightest intimation of what was going on: the debates
in the House of Commons on the American War, or the firing at Bunker's
Hill, disturbed not me: yet I thought this no evil--I neither ate,
drank, nor was merry, yet I did not complain: I had not then looked out
into this breathing world, yet I was well; and the world did quite as
well without me as I did without it! Why, then, should I make all this
outcry about parting with it, and being no worse off than I was before?
There is nothing in the recollection that at a certain time we were not
come into the world that 'the gorge rises at'--why should we revolt at
the idea that we must one day go out of it? To die is only to be as we
were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or
repugnance, in contemplating this last idea. It is rather a relief and
disburthening of the mind: it seems to have been holiday-time with us
then: we were not called to appear upon the stage of life, to wear
robes or tatters, to laugh or cry, be hooted or applauded; we had lain
_perdus_ all this while, snug, out of harm's way; and had slept out our
thousands of centuries without wanting to be waked up; at peace and free
from care, in a long nonage, in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of
infancy, wrapped in the softest and finest dust. And the worst that we
dread is, after a short, fretful, feverish being, after vain hopes and
idle fears, to sink to final repose again, and forget the troubled dream
of life!... Ye armed men, knights templars, that sleep in the stone
aisles of that old Temple church, where all is silent above, and where
a deeper silence reigns below (not broken by the pealing organ), are ye
not contented where ye lie? Or would you come out of your long homes to
go to the Holy War? Or do ye complain that pain no longer visits you,
that sickness has done its worst, that you have paid the last debt to
nature, that you hear no more of the thickening phalanx of the foe, or
your lady's waning love; and that while this ball of earth rolls its
eternal round, no sound shall ever pierce through to disturb your
lasting repose, fixed as the marble over your tombs, breathless as the
grave that holds you! And thou, oh! thou, to whom my heart turns, and
will turn while it has feeling left, who didst love in vain, and whose
first was thy last sigh, wilt not thou too rest in peace (or wilt thou
cry to me complaining from thy clay-cold bed) when that sad heart is no
longer sad, and that sorrow is dead which thou wert only called into the
world to feel!
It is certain that there is nothing in the idea of a pre-existent state
that excites our longing like the prospect of a posthumous existence.
We are satisfied to have begun life when we did; we have no ambition
to have set out on our journey sooner; and feel that we have had quite
enough to do to battle our way through since. We cannot say,
The wars we well remember of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.
Neither have we any wish: we are contented to read of them in story, and
to stand and gaze at the vast sea of time that separates us from them.
It was early days then: the world was not _well-aired_ enough for us: we
have no inclination to have been up and stirring. We do not consider the
six thousand years of the world before we were born as so much time lost
to us: we are perfectly indifferent about the matter. We do not grieve
and lament that we did not happen to be in time to see the grand mask
and pageant of human life going on in all that period; though we are
mortified at being obliged to quit our stand before the rest of the
procession passes.
It may be suggested in explanation of this difference, that we know from
various records and traditions what happened in the time of Queen Anne,
or even in the reigns of the Assyrian monarchs, but that we have no
means of ascertaining what is to happen hereafter but by awaiting the
event, and that our eagerness and curiosity are sharpened in proportion
as we are in the dark about it. This is not at all the case; for at that
rate we should be constantly wishing to make a voyage of discovery to
Greenland or to the Moon, neither of which we have, in general, the
least desire to do. Neither, in truth, have we any particular solicitude
to pry into the secrets of futurity, but as a pretext for prolonging our
own existence. It is not so much that we care to be alive a hundred or
a thousand years hence, any more than to have been alive a hundred or
a thousand years ago: but the thing lies here, that we would all of us
wish the present moment to last for ever. We would be as we are, and
would have the world remain just as it is, to please us.