You fraudulent and forked of tongue, you coveters of fabled ends, what God if any bides in us? What solace is our ill to bear? What second life begins in us, we livers never and again? We tortured dreams and shadow-shapes that mortals yearn to stand too near to demonstrate they walk and breathe, to shore themselves against the end, to show Creation, We were here! in opposite to all of them? What makes you think us innocent when we were never so in life, as though death were a remedy for mortal sin, for mortal strife? And whether it be larceny or cruel manoeuvres of the heart or faithlessness or robbery or murder done in money’s name, where do they go, these blackened acts, if not with us into the grave, there to perfume the coffin air and gird our pillows as we dream, perhaps of fortunes otherwise than those to which we dead are chained? And yet you set out just the same, though after what we wonder still? What makes you stake your undead souls on what you are foredoomed to lose?