Six weeks passed away. Winter was deepening. Through the gloom and fog
that shrouded London, Christmas approached, wrapped in seasonable snow.
The dying man had finished his work, and a strange peace stole over
him. Now, when he suffered, when his body shivered and tried to shrink
away, as if it felt the cold hands of death laid upon it, he looked at
the completed statue, and found he could still feel joy. There had
always been in his highly-strung, sensitive nature an element, so
fantastic that he had ever striven to conceal it, of romance; and in his
mind, affected by constant pain, by many sleepless nights, grew the
curious idea that his life, as it ebbed away from him, entered into his
creation. As he became feeble, he imagined that the man he had formed
towered above him in more God-like strength, that light flowed into the
sightless eyes, that the marble muscles were tense with vigour, that a
soul was born in the thing which had been soulless. The theory, held by
so many, of re-incarnation upon earth, took root in his mind, and he
came to believe that, at the moment of death, he would pass into his
work and live again, unconscious, it might be, of his former existence.
He loved the statue as one might love a breathing man; but he seldom
spoke of his fancies, even to Sydney.