]
'I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard;
these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery
is repugnant. I read the names upon the stones and find a deep solace
in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.
There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or
an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end
having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came
late or soon? There is no such gratulation as _Hic jacet_. There
is no such dignity as that of death. In the path trodden by the
noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is
the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for
them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly
tenderness. The dead amid this leafy silence seem to whisper
encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers: As we are, so shalt thou
be; and behold our quiet!'--(p. 183.)
And in this deeply moving and beautiful passage we get a foretaste, it may
be, of the euthanasia, following a brief summer of St. Martin, for which
the scarred and troublous portions of Gissing's earlier life had served as
a preparation.
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