I look out across the autumn lake and think in a conventional way how sorry I shall be to leave a place of such beauty that I have loved so intensely.  I have made of that love one of the grounds of my whole being, one of the goods of my life, one of the purposes for my being here.  But then I understand that it is not “I” that shall be leaving.  Or if it is, if I am to imagine some persistence of this consciousness in an afterlife, it is impossible for me to think that none of these beautiful Forms shall persist with me.  If I live on, if my happiness in that persistence is intended by powers I cannot at present understand, it is impossible for me to conceive that I shall hang suspended in some ether without consciousness of sense, without pleasure in beauty, without longing to touch some thing as distant as the far shore of this present lake is to my present hand.  It may be so; perhaps, in some Dantesque floral arrangement, I shall hang there hymning my generous God; or perhaps he will have flung me down into fire, and that will explain why I might continue and yet these colours of these leaves and textures and the stillness of these waters might cease, for me, entirely.  As far as I have resolved such matters, I can’t conceive it otherwise but that, if I linger at all beyond death, it will be in some such landscape, among some such astonishments.  And if I don’t linger at all, which I wholly expect, then I shall not be there to regret.  And these beautés de la nature will persist for others.  It seems churlish to be unhappy over such surviving others; instead, if I can, I will bless their enduring with whatever gift I have had of eyes, of touch, of tongue, of hand for writing.