If the existence of Burnes was but a
troubled dream, his death oblivion, what avails it that the Senate
should pause to recount his virtues? Neither veneration nor reverence is
due the dead if they are but dust; no cenotaph should be reared to
preserve for posterity the memory of their achievements if those who
come after them are to be only their successors in annihilation and
extinction. If in this world only we have hope and consciousness duty
must be a chimera; our pleasures and our passions should be the guides
of conduct, and virtue is indeed a superstition if life ends at the
grave. This is the conclusion which the philosophy of negation must
accept at last. Such is the felicity of those degrading precepts which
make the epitaph the end. If the life of Burnes is as a taper that is
burned out then we treasure his memory and his example in vain, and the
latest prayer of his departing spirit has no more sanctity to us, who
soon or late must follow him, than the whisper of winds that stir the
leaves of the protesting forest, or the murmur of the waves that break
upon the complaining shore.
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