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Episodes before Thirty
epitaph he so often told me with an ironic smile he had chosen for his own was not, however, used. Talk, he always declared, vain, excessive talk, lay at the bottom of every misunderstanding in the world. If people would talk less, there would be less trouble in life. "Sorry I spoke," was to be cut upon one of his tombstones; "Sorry they spoke" upon the other.
A poem he wrote—published, like the Night Song, in Harper's Magazine—describing death, I have kept all these years. The strange intensity of expression he put into the passage which begins: "The sand of my Being is fused and runs . . . " lives in my mind to this day. The title of the poem was "The Final Word":
Hence then at last! For the strife is past
Of the Birth and Death, of the Self and Soul;
The memory breaks, the breath forsakes,
The waves of the æther o'er me roll.
The pulses cease, and the Hours release
Their wearied school of the nerves and brain;
I fall on the Deep of the Mystic Sleep,
Where the Word that is Life can be heard again.
And the fires descend, and my fragments blend,
And the sand of my Being is fused and runs
To the mould of a glass for the rays to pass
Of the Sun of the centre that rules all suns.
But, or ever I rest, I take from my breast
My blood-drained heart for the tablet white
Of a gospel page to the far-off Age—
O Hand eternal!--Come forth—and write!
Of the Birth and Death, of the Self and Soul;
The memory breaks, the breath forsakes,
The waves of the æther o'er me roll.
The pulses cease, and the Hours release
Their wearied school of the nerves and brain;
I fall on the Deep of the Mystic Sleep,
Where the Word that is Life can be heard again.
And the fires descend, and my fragments blend,
And the sand of my Being is fused and runs
To the mould of a glass for the rays to pass
Of the Sun of the centre that rules all suns.
But, or ever I rest, I take from my breast
My blood-drained heart for the tablet white
Of a gospel page to the far-off Age—
O Hand eternal!--Come forth—and write!
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