The Whispering Gallery, Part IV [pp. 421-426]

OVERLAND MONTHLY
since its strongest lines embody the same idea as those you have just quoted. It
never has occurred to me to make these comparisons; but as we pursue the subject it seems to me that Manrique's elegy on his father is one of the finest -
though it is a long time since I read it. You can hardly accuse him of borrowing,
for he lived a century earlier than Shakespeare. Of course I read the poem in
Longfellow's translation, as I am not familiar with Spanish."
"Your comparison of ideas and dates," said Miss Ravaline, "calls to mind another favorite consolation expressed by many writers. It is perhaps the best
-thing in Bryant's'Thanatopsis'
'Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world - with kings,
The powerful of the earth, the wise, the good,Fair forms and hoary seers of ages past -
All in one mighty sepulchre.'
"But it is not original with Bryant. The same idea is set forth in the book of
Job, and more specifically in the last speech of Socrates."
"It would be more comforting," said Elacott, "if the poets and philosophers
could give us an absolute assurance that we shall not only lie down with these
great and wise people, but shall also arise with them and be admitted to their society in another world. And I suspect that the fallacy of most of the literature on
the subject - if there is a fallacy - is exactly at that point."
I asked Miss Ravaline if she had consulted the novelists as well as the poets.
"Not so extensively," she answered; "there was no need, for few of them say
anything on the subject. But there are two notable examples, both Americanone book being the work of a man, and the other of a woman. The woman's book
which professes to rend the great veil,'behind which broods ever the mighty
Perhaps,' as one of our poets has it - was an amazemlent to me. She has the
assurance to undertake a task from which Shakespeare or Browning might have
shrunk, with no more equipment, as her work shows, than the clumsiest of imaginations, and an utter lack of any sense of the ridiculous. When she calls us to look
at the eternal mansion she has prepared for us we find it such a wooden structure
as might serve for a child's play-house, and furnished as a child would furnish it.
I can not understand why such a book attains a wide circulation, unless it is because we poor mortals are always ready to accept the flimsiest promise of any solution of the great problem. The mnan's book is more modest, but equally futile.
The heroine, after struggling long with the mysterious facts and elusive suggestions that challenge the attention of all of us and awaken our most serious
thoughts, at last contents herself by uniting with the most formal church and accepting the most dogmatic creed! The author, after walking all round the subject and viewing it very critically from the outside, as the Trojans examined the
wooden horse, flatly gives up the problem and tells us, on his last page, that we
must all wait till we are dead! It strikes me that when he found his book led to
that conclusion, it should have occurred to him that the only logical thing to do
was. to suppress it."
"That might be logical," said I, "but it would not be professional. The first
mnaxim of youtr professional author is, that what is writ is writ - and(l consequenitly
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