As the end drew near his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing wonders; on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward, to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning, which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that, in the silence of the receding world, he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.
IV.
A THRENODY ON GARFIELD.
BY MRS. ELLEN KEY BLUNT.
How beautiful it was to die as he has died,
Taking a calm around him by the force
Of his great soul, commanding peace from strife,
And changing all the discord into rest,—
A heavenly music heard as life departs!
How wonderful it was that the accursed hate
Which smote him brought forth only loyal love;
Like to some holy bell that being struck
Resounds with wondrous sweetness, sounding on
Through all the spaces to eternity.
How noble was his dauntless fortitude
Which, as he lay expiring, day by day,
Made him almost control his destiny
And look upon his torture with a smile.
As his life wasted, in great patience, wonderingly
His watchers watched him. They were not alone
Of his own people, but his watchers were the world,
From far-off shores and seas with pitiful
Sad yearnings towards him as his star went down.
Nine times ten million souls in his own tongue
Prayed to the Almighty for his single life;
But he had risen too near to heaven in his great flight
To stoop again to earth, and so God took him,
Like a star folded in more perfect light.
And he is dead, and multitudes have come
To his dead presence, and, with solemn care,
Moving in silence to the measured strain
He loved, in mournful sweet monotony
Repeated as they bore him step by step
Through harvest-fields of ripening trodden grain,
They laid him reverently, gently down
Where all the sheaves of earth are garnered at the last.