'I am ill. I have eaten and drunk nothing for eleven days, and I am so tired and shaky that I can only get from the bed to the chair, and back. Rinna is attending me.... In this distressing condition be so kind as to help me to some reading. Of Cooper's I have read the "Last of the Mohicans," the "Spy," the "Pilot," and the "Pioneers." If you have anything else of his I entreat you to leave it with Frau von Bogner at the Coffee-house. My brother, who is conscientiousness itself, will bring it to me in the most conscientious way. Or anything else. Your friend,
'Schubert.'
On the 14th he took to his bed, but for two days more he was able to sit up and correct the proofs of some of the songs in the 'Winterreise.' He grew rapidly weaker, however, and by the 17th he was quite delirious. On the evening of the next day he called Ferdinand to his side, and, bidding him put his ear close to his mouth, he whispered: 'Brother, what are they doing with me?' 'Dear Franz,' was the reply, 'they are doing all they can to get you well again, and the doctor assures us you will soon be all right, only you must do your best to stay in bed.' For a space the sick man lay quiet, then, as the delirium increased, his mind reverted to the same idea: 'I implore you to put me in my own room, and not to leave me in this corner under the earth. Don't I deserve a place above ground?' 'Dear Franz,' cried his brother, 'be calm—trust your brother Ferdinand, whom you have always trusted, and who loves you so dearly. You are in the room which you always had, and lying on your own bed.' 'Ah, no,' replied the dying composer, 'that cannot be true, for Beethoven is not here!' Thus in his last moments his poor, wandering mind was dwelling upon the master whom he reverenced; to be near him, even in death, was the last wish, the last hope to which he clung!
When, later on, the doctor came, he tried to reassure the sufferer with hopes of recovery; but Schubert gazed at him with earnestness without speaking, and then, turning himself away, he beat the wall with his hands, saying in slow, earnest tone: 'Here, here is my end,' At three o'clock in the afternoon of the following day, November 19, 1828, he breathed his last. Thus passed away, in comparative youth, a composer of whom it has been written: 'There never has been one like him, and there never will be another.'
The funeral took place on November 21, and a large number of friends gathered to pay their last respects to the dead composer as he lay in his coffin, dressed in accordance with the prevailing custom, like a hermit, with a crown of laurel about his brows. The poor old father, still drudging as schoolmaster in the Rossau district, where he had been labouring ever since he had left the old home in the Himmelpfortgrund, would have buried his dear son in the cemetery near at hand; but Ferdinand told him of Franz's last wish, and, like the noble brother that he was, gave a sum out of his own scanty earnings in order to defray the extra cost of removing the body to the Währinger burial-place. Thither, accordingly, it was taken, and committed to the ground in a grave close to that occupied by the master he loved so well. The monument which was erected over the grave in the following year, by the efforts of his friends and admirers, bears the following inscription: