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Schreiner, Olive, 1855-1920

"The Story of an African Farm, a novel"


Death's finger is everywhere. The rocks are built up of a life that was.
Bodies, thoughts, and loves die: from where springs that whisper to the
tiny soul of man, "You shall not die"? Ah, is there no truth of which this
dream is shadow?
He fell into perfect silence. And, at last, as he walked there with his
bent head, his soul passed down the steps of contemplation into that vast
land where there is always peace; that land where the soul, gazing long,
loses all consciousness of its little self, and almost feels its hand on
the old mystery of Universal unity that surrounds it.
"No death, no death," he muttered; "there is that which never dies--which
abides. It is but the individual that perishes, the whole remains. It is
the organism that vanishes, the atoms are there. It is but the man that
dies, the Universal Whole of which he is part reworks him into its inmost
self. Ah, what matter that man's day be short!--that the sunrise sees him,
and the sunset sees his grave; that of which he is but the breath has
breathed him forth and drawn him back again. That abides--we abide."
For the little soul that cries aloud for continued personal existence for
itself and its beloved, there is no help. For the soul which knows itself
no more as a unit, but as a part of the Universal Unity of which the
Beloved also is a part; which feels within itself the throb of the
Universal Life; for that soul there is no death.


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