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Extracts from the Writings of W. M. Thackeray
Extracts from the Writings of W M Thackeray Author:William Makepeace Thackeray Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DEATH. HOW SOON CONSOLED. Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming th... more »at any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.— Vanity Fair, ii. 68. REMEMBERED FOR A SPACE. Would you desire that grief for you should last for a few more weeks? and does after-life seem less solitary, provided that our names, when we " go down into silence," are echoing on this side of the grave yet for a little while, and human voices are still talking about us?—Pendennis, ii. 215. DYING THOUGHTS. Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him—his early hopeful struggles, his manlysuccesses and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition—no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him—neither name nor money to bequeath—a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed ? To have, and to be forced to yield ; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, " To-morrow, success or failure won't matter much : and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil." Yes, I think that will be the better ending of the two, after all. Suppose you are particularly rich and well to do, and say on that last day, "I am very rich ; I am tolerably well known ; I have lived all my life in the best society, and, thank Heaven, come of a most re...« less