Intimations of immortality in Swift and Keats: a note. (English author and satirist Jonathan Swift; English poet John Keats)

I cryed out as in a Rapture; Happy Nation, where every Child hath at least a Chance for being immortal! Happy People who enjoy so many living Examples of antient Virtue, and have Masters ready to instruct them in the Wisdom of all former Ages! But, happiest beyond all Comparison are those excellent Struldbruggs, who being born exempt from that universal Calamity of human Nature, have their Minds free and disingaged, without the Weight and Depression of Spirits caused by the continual Apprehension of Death...(1)

And so it goes on. In its context in the third voyage, Gulliver's precipitate vision of the unending profit and pleasure enjoyed, not just by the Struldbruggs, but also by their society, identifies him as yet another absurd `Projector'. Like his counterparts at the Academy of Lagado, he fails rationally and responsibly to consider the consequences of the idea that so captivates his imagination.

Again in the context of the third voyage, it is a rare lapse on Gulliver's part. Having been thoroughly inculpated in the bitter satire on modern European civilization near the end of the second voyage, Gulliver has remained largely `transparent' throughout his tour of Laputa and Balnibarbi. On learning of the Struldbruggs, …