"Another Finis, another slice of life which Tempus edax has
devoured! And I may have to write the word once or twice, perhaps,
and then an end of Ends. [Finite is ever and Infinite beginning.]
Oh, the troubles, the cares, the ennui, [the complications,] the
repetitions, the old conversations over and over again, and here and
there all the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the forever-
remembered!

"[And then] A few chapters more, and then the last, and behold
Finis itself coming to an end, and the Infinite beginning."


"How like music this," writes Dr. John Brown--"like one trying the
same air in different ways, as it were, searching out and sounding
all its depths!" The words were almost the last that Thackeray
wrote, perhaps the very last. They reply, as it were, to other
words which he had written long before to Mrs. Brookfield.

"I don't pity anybody who leaves the world; not even a fair young
girl in her prime; I pity those remaining. On her journey, if it
pleases God to send her, depend on it there's no cause for grief,
that's but an earthly condition. Out of our stormy life, and
brought nearer the Divine light and warmth, there must be a serene
climate. Can't you fancy sailing into the calm?"

Ah! nowhere else shall we find the Golden Bride, "passionless bride,
divine Tranquillity."

As human nature persistently demands a moral, and, as, to say truth,
Thackeray was constantly meeting the demand, what is the lesson of