the rudderless bark is drifting,
through the shoals of the quick-sands shifting—
In the end shall the night-rack lifting,
discover the shores unknown?”
The idea of killing himself seems to have been with him from almost the first. It was not “bitter” to him: “man in his blindness” taught so; but, to him that
“mystic hour
when the wings of the shadowy angel lower,”
was not without its charm. “When I first heard the sad news,” Mr. Hammersley tells us, “I was not the least surprised. I really expected that what did happen would happen.” We all know Gordon’s poem, “De Te.” The last two verses of it are the best criticism that we have to offer “of him,” “found dead in the heather, near his home, with a bullet from his own rifle in his brain:”
“No man may shirk the allotted work,
the deed to do, the death to die;