After Stella’s death he wrote little:[117] perhaps he furbished up the closing parts of Gulliver; there were letters to John Gay, light and gossipy; and to Pope, weightier and spicier.
But the great tree was dying at the top. He grew stingier and sterner, and broke into wild spasms of impatience, such as only a diseased brain could excuse and explain. His loneliness became a more and more fearful thing to be borne; but who shall live with this half-mad man of gloom?
At length it is only a hired keeper who can abide with him: yet still he is reckless, proud, defiant, merciless, with no words coming to his fagged brain whereby he may express his thought; having thoughts, but they were bitter ones; having penitences maybe, but very vain ones; having remorses—ah, what abounding ones!
Finally he has no longer the power, if the grace were in him, to ask pardon of the humanity he has wronged; or to tell of the laments—if at that stage he entertained them—over the grave of thwarted purposes and of shattered hopes; condemned to that imbecile silence which overtook him at last, and held him four weary years in fool’s grasp, suffering and making blundering unintelligible moans.
He died in 1745—twenty-two years after Vanessa’s death—seventeen years after the death of Stella.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Sir Walter Raleigh, b. 1552; executed 1618.
[2] Unless we except The Ocean to Cynthia, piquant fragments of which exist, extending to some five hundred lines; the poem, by the estimate of Mr. Gosse, may have reached in its entirety a length of ten thousand lines. See Athenæum for January 2, 1886; also, Raleigh (pp. 44-48) by Edmund Gosse. London, 1886.