THE END AND ENDS OF LIFE

To

O be famous and to be loved were the modest boons the great Balzac asked of life. Both were granted him. Yet he died in bitter sorrow, pleading with his doctor for even six hours more of life. Fame had reached its brilliant culmination, love's long passion was crowned by marriage, the heavy burden of debt was lifted and the golden hour for the indulgence of his splendid genius just at hand when death dropped the curtain and tore him from all that was dear in life. Is it strange that he found it hard to go and leave so much beneath the friendly summer sun? Would it have been easier to loose his hold when clouds lowered, life's struggle seemed vain, and its burdens too heavy to be borne?

It is for mortal man at his best estate to say, for the majority of great men go out by one or the other of these doors. To build the house beautiful and abide in it, to reach the mountain top and enjoy its star-charmed freedom and repose, is given to the merest fraction of the human race.

Yet death is so busy with great and low alike in these latter days that its relation to life may well arouse fresh thought and questioning in human breasts. And surely the man who can see his earthly hopes and desires realized even for one brief hour of the golden day, would seem more ready to say with Stevenson, "Glad did I live and gladly die" than he who must yield up this earthly chance with all the longings of his soul unsatisfied. It may be that to the majority of earth's children the kindliest feature of the stern summons is in the poet's whisper,

"Death comes to set thee free,

Oh, meet him cheerily,

And all thy fears shall cease
And in eternal peace

Thy sorrows end."

But this is not the happiest, the bravest, nor the truest note in mortal pathways. Not "eternal peace," not dreamless sleep, but the life more abundant is what strong souls desire and the achievement of life's ends in one stage of being is the best pledge of their achievement in another. By the very logic of existence it must be a sorrow and a loss to die with one true end of human life and joy unrealized. A man must win a man's joy here or nowhere, and there is a pathos unmeasured in the face of the countless lives that miss ita crime unmeasured in the social wrongs and lunacies that conspire to frustrate it. Yet the crowning madness lies in the spiritless manner in which ordinary mortals yield up their birthright of joy at the behest of a blind and sordid world with all "its sickly forms that err from honest nature's rule."

“Let a man contend to his uttermost for his life's set prize be it what it will," is the charge of a wise philosopher as well as a Christian poet. And the future doom of those who fail in this is told in the flaming lines,

"They see not God I know,

Nor all that chivalry of His,

The soldier saints, who row on row,
Burn upward to their point of bliss,

Since the end of life being manifest,

They had burned their way through the world to this."

The pity of it is, though perhaps too, the glory, that men must burn their way through the stupid and jealous

world to most any point of bliss marked out for themselves. And as Browning held with Drummond that love is the greatest thing in the world it is there that he fixes the prize most to be sought by those who would mount upward in the path of being. As one of his best commentators notes, "For Browning love both symbolizes and arouses that thirst for the Infinite which is the primary need of humanity." And this claim is dimly confirmed in that ideal of purity and goodness which even the most commonplace lovers seek in each other. Yet nothing is so beset with difficulties, wrongs, and base suspicions, as love, and to "burn their way" through an uncomprehending world to it, has been the need of nearly all the famous lovers of history. Assuredly in studying the relations of life and death the nature of one's controlling affection is of all importance. For it is love that alone can conquer death and give the crowning evidence of immortality. All human history bears testimony to the divine truth that-"love, pure and true, is to the soul the sweet immortal dew, that gems life's petals in its hour of dusk."

"If you would make out the tangled map of life," said a great preacher, "let love teach you," and surely if you would master the pass of death love must point the way. For "life is God and God is love," and nothing but his own weak surrender of his birthright can separate man from that life in love. The "unlit lamp and the ungirt loin" is the ground of loss here as elsewhere: What adverse fate and outside foes may wrest from the soul's desires here is sure to be regained hereafter. "There shall never be one lost good. What was shall live as before," and in the faith of that one may smile at the utmost that "envious and calumniating time" can do to rob the good and true of their ultimate and happy ends. Without this faith all human

life is a mockery and a tragedy, in the face of death. From the physical standpoint no truer picture was ever drawn of it than Ingersoll offered at his brother's grave, when he said: "Whether in mid sea or among the breakers of the farther shore a wreck must mark at last the end of each and all. Every life, no matter if its every hour is jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become a tragedy as sad, and deep, and dark, as can be woven of the warp and woof of mystery and death."

"Silence and pathetic dust" are indeed all that mortal man can see in his end save as the immortal spirit asserts its union with the eternal goodness, the everlasting love.

TWIN STARS IN LOVE'S FIRMAMENT

TH

NRULY, the poetry of earth is never dead.
Nuova" is still the love poem of the ages.

The "Vita
Its appeal

is as direct and vital to the lovers of today as when the youthful Dante inscribed it to the fair Lady Beatrice through the mists of medieval thought and theology. It is interesting indeed, to find recently a theological journal bringing home this appeal to the men of our troubled hour, and casting the immortal rôle of the great Bard mainly in the realm of immortal love. For it is as a disciple of love that the writer in question considers Dante's relation and message to mankind and verily womankind may read between the lines.

Duly recognizing Dante's immortal fame, not only as a poet but as a prophet and pioneer of truth and freedom, the writer states "he was also an arch lover, a tender, chaste, ardent disciple of love." And to point the moral of this phase of his renown he adds "his pure love, his obedient following of the light Beatrice shed upon his life are a constant challenge to every true man to follow the purest and brightest star that shines for his own soul."

Many a poet and not a few philosophers have advanced such lofty views of love as make it the purest and brightest star that shines for man's soul. But not all of these have ventured to advise man to follow it under the circumstances which attended Dante's faithful devotion to his "Glorious lady." For this love of Dante's was certainly compassed about with many of those features that render