"WHY I LONG FOR DEATH."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 146, 11 June 1908, Page 4

"WHY I LONG FOR DEATH."

REMARKABLE LETTER OF COUNT TOLSTOI. Count Tulstoi, the famous Russian author, replying to a friend who coin gratulated him recently on the approach ot his eightieth birthday and the celebration* planned for it, said: "It is another haziness that 1 await —- Death.'' The Paris Matin recently published a letter from the veteran author, | in which hu amplifies that saying, and 1 adds that all earthly life is a dream and death the true awakening. "All our life, from birth to death," he writes, "is it not, Avalh all its I dreams, itself a dream V Does not our belief in its reality spring solely and entirely from our ignorance of any other life more real? Our earthly life is one of the dreams of another and more lvnl life, and thut other life is a dream of yet another life, and so on ad infinitum, even to the last life, tlic life of Cod. "Death in youth is as when a man is awakened before he has slept full measure. Death in old uge is as when a man wakes of 'his own accord after good sleep. 'Suicide is as a nightmare which a man banishes by remembering that hi; is asleep; he makes an eil'ort, and lie wakes.

"Deep sleep, without dreaius, is comparable to semi-bestiality. it is the sleeper conscious of what goes 011 around him, and ready to awake at any moment, who has knowledge, though but vague, of t'he life whence he came and whither he shall, return.

" Even in the present dream-life wc feel that which thy new life will perhaps make'real to us. The earthly form in which the awakening of our knowledge ot tire true life liuds us appears as a limitation to the free development of our spirit. The true life begins when that limitation is removed. This idea embodies all the knowledge of the truth whii'h givos to man the consciousness of eternal life. *'l believe with nil my soul in what I say. 1 feel, i know with certainty, that in dying I shall be happy, that 1 shall enter a world more real."