Note 8 — BOOK XI.
Reading edition
—Page 399, stanza cxvi.
'And what is death?—a name for nothingness."
The sublime idea of the nonentity of death, of the instantaneous transit of the soul from one phase and cycle of being to another, is earnestly insisted upon by the early Cymrian bards, in terms which seem borrowed from some spiritual belief anterior to that which does in truth teach that the life of man once begun, has not only no end, but no pause—and, in the triumphal cry of the Christian, "O grave, where is thy victory!"—annihilates death.