I.

There once lived in a great city, where the dead were all but

innumerable, a young man by the name of Nicholas Vane, who possessed a

singular genius for the making of tombstones. So beautiful they were,

and so fitly designed to express the shadowy pain of mortal memory or

the bright forecasting of eternal hope, that all persons were held

fortunate who could secure them for the calm resting-places of their

beloved sleepers. Indeed, the curious tale was whispered round that the

bereft were not his only patrons, but that certain personages who were

peculiarly ambitious of posthumous fame--seeing they had not long to

live, and unwilling to intrust others with the grave responsibility of

having them commemorated--had gone to his shop and secretly advised with

him respecting such monuments as might preserve their memories from too

swift oblivion.

However this may fall out, certain it is that his calling had its

secrets; and once he was known to observe that no man could ever

understand the human heart until he had become a maker of tombstones.

Whether the knowledge thus derived should make of one a laughing or a

weeping philosopher, Nicholas himself remained a joyous type of youthful

manhood--so joyous, in fact, that a friend of his who wrought in colour,

strolling one day into the workshop where Nicholas stood surrounded by

the exquisite shapes of memorial marbles, had asked to paint the scene

as a representation of Life chiselling to its beautiful purposes the

rugged symbols of Death, and smiling as it wove the words of love and

faith across the stony proofs of the universal tragedy. Afterwards, it

is true, a great change was wrought in the young artisan.

He had just come in one morning and paused to look around at the

various finished and unfinished mortuary designs.

"Truly," he said to himself all at once, "if I were a wise man, I'd

begin this day's business by chiselling my own head-stone. For who knows

but that before sunset my brother the gravedigger may be told to build

me one of the houses that last till doomsday! And what man could then

make the monument to stop the door of _my_ house with. But why should I

have a monument? If I lie beneath it, I shall not know I lie there. If I

lie not there, then it will not stand over me. So, whether I lie there,

or lie not there, what will it matter to me then? Ay; but what if, being

dead only to this world and living in another, I should yet look on the

monument erected to my memory and therefore be the happier? I know not;

nor to what end we are vexed with this desire to be remembered after

death. The prospect of vanishing from a poor, toilsome life fills us

with such consternation and pain! It is therefore we strive to impress

ourselves ineffaceably on the race, so that, after we have gone hence,

or ceased to be, we may still have incorporeal habitation among all

coming generations."

Here he was interrupted by a low knock at the door. Bidden to come in,

there entered a man of delicate physiognomy, who threw a hurried glance

around and inquired in an anxious tone--

"Sir, are you alone?"

"I am never alone," replied Nicholas in a ringing voice; "for I dwell

hard by the gate-way of life and death, through which a multitude is

always passing."

"Not so loud, I beseech you," said the visitor, stretching forth his

thin, white hands with eager deprecation. "I would not, for the world,

have any one discover that I have been here."

"Are you, then, a personage of such importance to the world?" said

Nicholas, smiling, for the stranger's appearance argued no worldly

consideration whatsoever. The suit of black, which his frail figure

seemed to shrink away from with very sensitiveness, was glossy and

pathetic with more than one covert patch. His shoes were dust-covered

and worn. His long hair went round his head in a swirl, and he bore

himself with an air of damaged, apologetic, self-appreciation.

"I am a poet," he murmured with a flush of pain, dropping his large

mournful eyes beneath the scrutiny of one who might be an unsympathetic

listener. "I am a poet, and I have come to speak with you privately of

my--of the--of a monument. I am afraid I shall be forgotten. It is a

terrible thought."

"Can you not trust your poems to keep you remembered?" asked Nicholas,

with more kindliness.

"I could if they were as widely read as they should be." He appeared

emboldened by his hearer's gentleness. "But, to confess the truth, I

have not been accepted by my age. That, indeed, should give me no pain,

since I have not written for it, but for the great future to which alone

I look for my fame."

"Then why not look to it for your monument also?"

"Ah, sir!" he cried, "there are so many poets in the world that I might

be entirely overlooked by posterity, did there not descend to it some

sign that I was held in honour by my own generation."

"Have you never noticed," he continued, with more earnestness, "that

when strangers visit a cemetery they pay no attention to the thousands

of little head-stones that lie scattered close to the ground, but hunt

out the highest monuments, to learn in whose honour they were erected?

Have you never heard them exclaim: 'Yonder is a great monument! A great

man must be buried there. Let us go and find out who he was and what he

did to be so celebrated.' O sir, you and I know that this is a poor way

of reasoning, since the greatest monuments are not always set over the

greatest men. Still the custom has wrought its good effects, and

splendid memorials do serve to make known in years to come those whom

they commemorate, by inciting posterity to search for their actions or

revive their thoughts. I warrant you the mere bust of Homer----"

"You are not mentioning yourself in the same breath with Homer, I hope,"

said Nicholas, with great good-humour.

"My poems are as dear to me as Homer's were to him," replied the poet,

his eyes filling.

"What if you _are_ forgotten? Is it not enough for the poet to have

lived for the sake of beauty?"

"No!" he cried passionately. "What you say is a miserable error. For the

very proof of the poet's vocation is in creating the beautiful. But how

know he has created it? By his own mind? Alas, the poet's mind tells him

only what is beautiful to _him_! It is by fame that he knows it--fame,

the gratitude of men for the beauty he has revealed to them! What is so

sweet, then, as the knowledge that fame has come to him already, or

surely awaits him after he is dead?"

"We labour under some confusion of ideas, I fear," said Nicholas, "and,

besides, are losing time. What kind of mon----"

"That I leave to you," interrupted the poet. "Only, I should like my

monument to be beautiful. Ah, if you but knew how all through this poor

life of mine I have loved the beautiful! Never, never have I drawn near

it in any visible form without almost holding my breath as though I were

looking deep, deep into God's opened eyes. But it was of the epitaph I

wished to speak."

Hereupon, with a deeper flush, he drew from a large inside

breast-pocket, that seemed to have been made for the purpose, a worn

duodecimo volume, and fell to turning the much-fingered pages.

"This," he murmured fondly, without looking up, "is the complete

collection of my poems."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Nicholas, with deep compassion.

"Yes, my complete collection. I have written a great deal more, and

should have liked to publish all that I have written. But it was

necessary to select, and I have included here only what it was

intolerable to see wasted. There is nothing I value more than a group of

elegiac poems, which every single member of my large family--who are

fine critics--and all my friends, pronounce very beautiful. I think it

would be a good idea to inscribe a selection from one on my monument,

since those who read the selection would wish to read the entire poem,

and those who read the entire poem would wish to read the entire

collection. I shall now favour you with these elegies."

"I should be happy to hear them; but my time!" said Nicholas

courteously. "The living are too impatient to wait on me; the dead too

patient to be defrauded."

"Surely you would not refuse to hear one of them," exclaimed the poet,

his eyes flashing.

"Read _one_, by all means." Nicholas seated himself on a monumental

lamb.

The poet passed one hand gently across his forehead, as though to brush

away the stroke of rudeness; then, fixing upon Nicholas a look of

infinite remoteness, he read as follows:--

"He suffered, but he murmured not;

To every storm he bared his breast;

He asked but for the common lot--

To be a man among the rest.

"Here lies he now----"

"If you ask but for the common lot," interrupted Nicholas, "you should

rest content to be forgotten."

But before the poet could reply, a loud knock caused him to flap the

leaves of the "Complete Collection" together with one hand, while with

the other he gathered the tails of his long coat about him, as though

preparing to pass through some difficult aperture. The exaltation of his

mood, however, still showed itself in the look and tone of proud

condescension with which he said to Nicholas--

"Permit me to retire at once by some private passway."

Nicholas led him to a door in the rear of the shop, and there, with a

smile and a tear, stood for a moment watching the precipitate figure of

the retreating bard, who suddenly paused when disappearing and tore open

the breast of his coat to assure himself that his beloved elegies were

resting safe across his heart.

The second visitor was of another sort. He hobbled on a cork leg, but

inexorably disciplined the fleshly one into old-time firmness and

precision. A faded military cloak draped his stalwart figure. Part of

one bushy grey eyebrow had been chipped away by the same sword-cut that

left its scar across his battle-beaten face.

"I have come to speak with you about my monument," he said, in a gruff

voice that seemed to issue from the mouth of a rusty cannon. "Those of

my old comrades that did not fall at my side are dead. My wife died long

ago, and my little children. I am old and forgotten. It is a time of

peace. There's not a boy who will now listen to me while I tell of my

campaigns. I live alone. Were I to die to-morrow my grave might not have

so much as a head-stone. It might be taken for that of a coward. Make me

a monument for a true soldier."

"Your grateful country will do that," said Nicholas.

"Ha!" exclaimed the veteran, whom the shock of battle had made deaf long

ago.

"Your country," shouted Nicholas, close to his ear, "your country--will

erect a monument--to your memory."

"My country!" The words were shot out with a reverberating, melancholy

boom. "My country will do no such a thing. How many millions of soldiers

have fallen on her battle-fields! Where are their monuments? They would

make her one vast cemetery."

"But is it not enough for you to have been a true soldier? Why wish to

be known and remembered for it?"

"I know I do not wish to be forgotten," he replied simply. "I know I

take pleasure in the thought that long after I am forgotten there will

be a tongue in my monument to cry out to every passing stranger, 'Here

lies the body of a true soldier.' It is a great thing to be brave!"

"Is, then, this monument to be erected in honour of bravery, or of

yourself?"

"There is no difference," said the veteran bluntly. "Bravery _is_

myself."

"It is bravery," he continued, in husky tones, and with, a mist

gathering in his eyes that made him wink as though he were trying to see

through the smoke of battle--"it is bravery that I see most clearly in

the character of God. What would become of us if He were a coward? I

serve Him as my brave Commander; and though I am stationed far from Him

and may be faint and sorely wounded, I know that He is somewhere on the

battle-field, and that I shall see Him at last, approaching me as He

moves up and down among the ranks."

"But you say that your country does not notice you--that you have no

friends; do you, then, feel no resentment?"

"None, none," he answered quickly, though his head dropped on his bosom.

"And you wish to be remembered by a world that is willing to forget

you?"

He lifted his head proudly. "There are many true men in the world," he

said, "and it has much to think of. I owe it all I can give, all I can

bequeath; and I can bequeath it nothing but the memory of a true man."

One day, not long after this, there came into the workshop of Nicholas a

venerable man of the gravest, sweetest, and most scholarly aspect, who

spoke not a word until he had led Nicholas to the front window and

pointed a trembling finger at a distant church spire.

"You see yon spire?" he said. "It almost pierces the clouds. In the

church beneath I have preached to men and women for nearly fifty years.

Many that I have christened at the font I have married at the altar;

many of these I have sprinkled with dust. What have I not done for them

in sorrow and want! How have I not toiled to set them in the way of

purer pleasures and to anchor their tempest-tossed hopes! And yet how

soon they will forget me! Already many say I am too old to preach. Too

old! I preach better than I ever did in my life. Yet it may be my lot to

wander down into the deep valley, an idle shepherd with an idle crook. I

have just come from the writing of my next sermon, in which I exhort my

people to strive that their names be not written on earthly monuments

or human hearts, but in the Book of Life. It is my sublimest theme. If I

am ever eloquent, if I am ever persuasive, if I ever for one moment draw

aside to spiritual eyes the veil that discloses the calm, enrapturing

vistas of eternity, it is when I measure my finite strength against this

mighty task. But why? Because they are the sermons of my own aspiration.

I preach them to my own soul. Face to face with that naked soul I pen

those sermons--pen them when all are asleep save the sleepless Eye that

is upon me. Even in the light of that Eye do I recoil from the thought

of being forgotten. How clearly I foresee it! Ashes to ashes, dust to

dust! Where then will be my doctrines, my prayers, my sermons?"

"Is it not enough for you to have scattered your handful of good

broadcast, to ripen as endlessly as the grass? What if they that gather

know naught of him that sowed?"

"It is not enough. I should like the memory of _me_ to live on and

on in the world, inseparable from the good I may have done. What am I but

the good that is in me? 'Tis this that links me to the infinite and the

perfect. Does not the Perfect One wish His goodness to be associated

with His name? No! No! I do not wish to be forgotten!"

"It is mere vanity."

"Not vanity," said the aged servitor meekly. "Wait until you are old,

till the grave is at your helpless feet: it is the love of life."

But some years later there befell Nicholas an event that transcended all

past experiences, and left its impress on his whole subsequent life.