_I DIE._
I pass on now to tell of my death moments. The room in which I died was
the room in which I had been born. One half of it was my bedroom, and
the other half--that near the window--was my study. There I had done
all my work, and there were my books and papers. There, too, grouped
around the walls, were portraits of the men and women who seem to me
sometimes to be more myself, as Emerson puts it, than even I am, and
who are nearer to me and dearer to me, many of them, than are some of
those who sit daily with me in the household--I mean the portraits of
my favourite writers.
I do not know whether the literary associations of the room had any
part--probably they had--in determining the current of my thought, but
I remember that, during the first few hours of the morning preceding my
death, I found my mind running on poets and poetry. I recollect that I
was thinking chiefly of Rossetti, and of the fact that he was haunted,
as he lay a-dying, by passages from his own poems. Not that I saw or
see any cause in that fact for wonder, for I can recall lines of his
which I can believe would haunt one even in heaven.
Those of my readers who fail to appreciate in its fulness the saying
of "Diana of the Crossways" that in poetry "those that have souls
meet their fellows," or that of the _Saturday Review_, that "there
is an incommunicable magic in poetry which is foolishness to the
multitude,"--may think this an exaggeration. Ah well, they are of the
"multitude,"--the more pity for them!--and can never understand how
the soul is stirred by a simple sentence in the god-like language of
Shakespeare, or is as irresistibly swayed as are trees in a whirlwind
by a single stanza from Swinburne; how the magic witchery of a couplet
by Keats can bring tears to the eyes; or how the tender grace of a line
from Herrick can set the senses vibrating with an exquisite thrill of
joy. Nay, I could indicate sentences in the diamond-pointed prose of
George Meredith, pellucid sentences, crystal-clear and luminous as the
scintillations of Sirius (and for all their judicial poise and calmness
emitted like the Sirius scintillations at a white heat),--which affect
me in a similar way. There are few other writers of whom I could
affirm this with the like confidence; but Meredith's thoughts have
crystallized into a brain-stimulating prose--every sentence of which is
a satisfying mouthful to our intellectual hunger--which is sometimes
pure poetry.
Poetry is to my diary, however, and in fact to all I think or say,
what King Charles's head was to Mr. Dick's memorial, and it is time I
returned to my narrative.
The possibility of a fatal ending to my illness had never occurred to
myself or to my family, until that ending was nigh at hand, and so it
was that death came upon me in every way unawares. I remember my father
bending over me, and asking gently if I knew that I was dying, and I
recollect looking up to whisper back, "No: is it so?" and receiving
his sorrowful response. It was too late then for me to do more than
recognise the fact as a fact, for my brain was so strangely affected
that I was utterly incapable of following out that fact to its result.
I knew that I was dying--knew it much as I might have known it of some
other person--but felt no individual pang of terror or surprise. This
state of indifferent acquiescence in that which was about to occur
was followed by a sense of regret at having to leave a volume which I
had in hand unfinished, and then, with the ruling passion strong in
death, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe
my sensations. It is so with me ever and always. Art and Poetry have
become such realities, that I cannot take them up and lay them aside
at pleasure, but must needs bear them with me whithersoever I go. I
carry my poetry with me to bed and to breakfast; and I can sit and
write, or carry on a conversation, with the consciousness of Mr. Lang's
latest _Ballade_, or Mr. Theodore Watts's last sonnet, running like an
undercurrent in my mind. I am perpetually striving to fix in language
the fleeting colours of sea and sky. I can never listen to the trickle
and purl of a brooklet tinkling over its pebbly bed, without making
diligent search in my vocabulary for a word--the golden word--which
seems most to babble and to blab of water. As surely as I find in
Wordsworth's poems a background of sky and mountain, just as surely do
I find in mountain and sky an echo of Wordsworth's song. To me, too,
the sonnet which rises involuntarily to my lips, as I gaze out upon
the deep, is as much a part of the scene before me, as is the sun or
the sand upon the shore; and I have come to feel with Mr. Lowell, as
if a sunset were "like a quotation from Dante or Milton," and that "if
Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice
shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean."
I was telling you that as I lay a-dying, I found myself endeavouring
to find fitting words to describe my sensations. At this point,
however, the train of my thoughts was disturbed--and I recollect
a slight reawakening of my old characteristic irritability at the
interruption--by the entrance of a sister who had come from a distance
to see me. I remember slightly lifting my head to speak to her, and
then glancing round the room to see if all were present. Yes, close
beside me, and with his head bowed over his hands, sat my father, and
round about the bed were gathered the remainder of the family. Nor were
these all, for standing among them were three other figures--that of my
brother Fred, whose grave as yet was hardly green, and of my mother and
my little sister Comfort, both of whom had died when I was a child. If
my conviction that I have indeed been dead be a delusion,--as I doubt
not many of my readers will think,--is it not strange, I would ask,
that these faces should have been with me at the end? Had there been
any conjecture in my mind as to the probability of my meeting with my
lost ones, I could readily believe that what I saw was the creation
of my own brain. But there had been no such conjecture, for death
had taken me, as I have already explained, entirely unawares, and no
thought of the dead had as much as occurred to me. Their presence,
however, so far from causing me any surprise, seemed perfectly natural,
for the fact that they were dead did not dawn upon my consciousness.
This, I am ready to allow, strongly supports the theory that these
experiences may be nothing more than dreams, for in dreams it not
seldom happens that we re-live the past, and hold converse with our
departed ones, all oblivious of the death which has come between us.
It _may_ be so, I admit, but in my heart of hearts I cannot think it;
for if all that I have to tell be but a dream, then does it seem to me
the strangest dream ever dreamed by man. Moreover, with these three
figures was a fourth--a figure which at first had escaped my notice;
and it is the presence of this figure in the room which is to me most
unaccountable. My mother, when I first saw her, was standing at the
foot of the bed, with my dead brother and sister looking over her
shoulder, but at the sight of my father's grief, she went gently round
to where he was sitting, and with a caress of infinite pity stooped
down as if to whisper in his ear. It was then that I saw for the first
time that she held by the hand a little child--a little child whom I
had never seen before, but across whose face, as he looked up at me,
there flitted the phantom of a resemblance I could not catch.
I remember that even then, brain-benumbed and dying as I was, I
wondered who that little child could be; but there dawned upon me no
shadowy suspicion of the truth, and I passed away with that wonder
unremoved.
I think now--nay, I am sure--that I know who that child was. It was my
brother James John, the eldest of the family, who had died before I was
born, and whom, in this world, therefore, I had never seen.
I have little left to tell of my death, for nothing else occurred of
any moment, and I am resolved to confine myself strictly to facts. I
remember that immediately after I had seen my mother, and while I was
wondering who the child she held by the hand could be, there came over
me a strange and sudden sense of loss--of physical loss, I think it
was, as though some life-element had gone out from me. Of pain there
was none, nor was I disturbed by any mental anxiety. I recollect only
an ethereal lightness of limb, and a sense of soul-emancipation and
peace--a sense of soul-emancipation such as one might feel were he to
awaken on a sunny morning to find that all sorrow and sin were gone
from the world for ever; a peace ample and restful as the hallowed
hush and awe of summer twilight, without the twilight's tender pain.
Then I seemed to be sinking slowly and steadily through still depths
of sun-steeped, light-filled waters that sang in my ears with a sound
like a sweet-sad sobbing and soaring of music, and through which there
swam up to me, in watered vistas of light, scenes of sunny seas and
shining shores where smiling isles stretched league beyond league afar.
And so life ebbed and ebbed away, until at last there came a time--the
moment of death, I believe--when the outward and deathward setting tide
seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and
lifeward again on the inward-setting tide of that larger life into
which I had died.
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