'Repose?--rest?' interrupted Harleigh, 'how earned? By deserting our duties? By quitting our posts? By forsaking and wounding all by whom we are cherished?'
'One word, Harleigh, answers all that: Did we ask for our being? Why was it given us if doomed to be wretched? To whom are we accountable for renouncing a donation, made without our consent or knowledge? O, if ever that wretched thing called life has a noble moment, it must surely be that of its voluntary sacrifice! lopping off, at a blow, that hydra-headed monster of evil upon evil, called time; bounding over the imps of superstition; dancing upon the pangs of disease; and boldly, hardily mocking the senseless legends, that would frighten us with eternity!--Eternity? to poor, little, frail, finite beings like us! Oh Albert! worldly considerations, monkish inventions, and superstitious reveries set apart;--reason called forth, truth developed, probabilities canvassed,--say! is it not clear that death is an end to all? an abyss eternal? a conclusion? Nature comes but for succession; though the pride of man would give her resurrection. Mouldering all together we go, to form new earth for burying our successors.'
'Horrible, Elinor, most horrible! yet if, indeed, it is your opinion that you are doomed to sink to nothing; if your soul, in the full tide of its energies, and in the pride of intellect, seems to you a mere appendant to the body; if you believe it to be of the same fragile materials; how can you wish to shorten the so short period of consciousness? to abridge the so brief moment of sensibility? Is it not always time enough to think, feel, see, hear,--love and be loved no more?'
'Yes! 'tis always too soon to lose happiness; but misery,--ah Albert!--why should misery, when it can so easily be stilled, be endured?'
'Stilled, Elinor?--What mean you? By annihilation?--How an infidel assumes fortitude to wish for death, is my constant astonishment! To believe in the eternal loss of all he holds, or knows, or feels; to be persuaded that "this sensible, warm being" will "melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,"--and to believe that there all ends! Surely every species of existence must be preferable to such an expectation from its cessation! Dust! literal dust!--Food for worms!--to be trod upon;--crushed;--dug up;--battered down;--is that our termination? That,--and nothing more?'