A. A man! what else,
King, emperor, tyrant, shah, would matter not.
He would have been—a name; such as of old
Grew into gods!
B. And so he died?
A. He died.”
Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,
“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;
Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath;