Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 October 1886 — Immortality. [ARTICLE]

Immortality.

It is an undoubted fact that the de* ■ire for immortality which once animated poets, statesmen, soldiers, and orators, to the exclusion of nearly every other high thought, has, to some degree at least, gone out of fashion. And it is well that it is so. What more ridiculous thing can a man labor after than for fame after ho is dead ? Those who have achieved it have usually been people who have not striven after it, and have merely gone about the work for which nature had fitted them in a patient, conscientious spirit/ willing to give the world their best efforts for what it had to give in return. They were hot always posing as heroes who were to be celebrated in future ages. They went upon their way without dreaming of the immortality for which many weaker men toiled and struggled in vain; and they were cheerful, healthful spirits, without morbid longings after the plaudits of posterity. It was enough for them if they pleased their fellows, and made the people about them better and happier for their work. '■ In doing this they were, withoutknowing it, making preparation to add to the felicity of generations yet unborn. Shakspeare, we believe, was a man of this kind. He wrote plays for representation in his day, without a thought of the critics and commentators that were to come. His aim was to please his patrons, not some intangible beings who were to live in a shadowy hereafter, and who were to applaud his productions to the echo. He gave the multitude the choicest products of his fertile, vigorous brain, because he knew they needed strong intellectual food, and were willing to pay for it. The consequence was that he*retired in middle life, with an ample fortune, to enjoy the results of his writings, as a gentleman of leisure in his native town. He was no whining poet complaining of the neglect of his own age, and hoping for the applause of another. He had a healthful, strong mental and physical organization, that never allowed him to give way to foolish fits of despondency. He kept at work until he had accomplished his ends, and then was. content to leave the field to others and to rest from his labors, without trying to lift the veil of futurity to see what his standing would be in the years that were yet unborn. And-what is immortality, after all ? It is only a breath—a name. We say that Shakspeare was a great man, and even this is denied. There are certain wiseacres who come forward and try to prove that his plays were written by Lord Bacon. They cannot understand, even in this republican country, that a man may be a great one without having enjoyed the advantage of a scholastic education. They forget that nature gives brains, and that the schools only discipline them, and that sometimes the best practical education is attained by attrition and contact with the world. Immortality, then, is not worth striving after. Do your duty, whatever it may be, in the present, and if it is your lot tt> be remembered a hundred or more years hence, hope that it may be for some great good that you have done your fellow-man.— American Cultivator.