The historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who was in the army of Julian, states that when he was wounded his admirers compared the scene that followed in his tent to that which Plato has drawn in the prison of Socrates; not without the confession that it was an affected imitation. This testimony is preferable to the imaginary pictures of Christian orators of the apostate clutching the sand and crying, "O Galilean, thou hast conquered!" The real triumph of Christianity needs no such melodramatic inventions conceived in the spirit of an age of ornate rhetoric.—Smith's "Universal History, iii, 717."
Kalakaua (David, King of the Hawaiian Islands), 1836-1892. The monarch was unconscious of what was going on around him, and seemed to be dreaming of his early days. Colonel Baker heard him murmur something and leaning over the bedside could make out that he was speaking to himself in his native tongue of the oceans and mountains and natural scenery of Hawaii.
He died at San Francisco, Cal., while on a visit to the United States.
Kant (Immanuel, one of the greatest of German metaphysicians, founder of the Critical or Transcendental school of philosophy), 1724-1804. "Est ist gut," said as he declined a refreshing draught, offered him by one who thought he was suffering from thirst.
Keats (John), 1796-1821. "I feel the flowers growing over me." Some say his last words were: "I die of a broken heart."
The severity of an article written by Gifford in review of "Endymion" in the Quarterly Review affected the young poet very deeply, and is even said to have occasioned the consumption from which he died at Rome where he had but just completed his twenty-fourth year.
Over the grave of Keats in the Old Protestant cemetery at Rome is the inscription: "This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraved on his tombstone: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.' February 24, 1821."
In the "Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench," occurs the following distressing letter on the last days of Keats, addressed to Trench by a friend in Rome:
"I have made Severn's acquaintance. He is a very fine fellow, and I like him amazingly. My only introduction to him was our common admiration of Keats, whose memory he cherishes most affectionately, and of whom he is never tired of speaking when he finds one who listens with gladness. I sat in his studio for hours while he painted a design which Keats suggested to him, and all the while he was telling me particulars of his last days. His sufferings were terrible and prolonged. Shelley and Hunt had deprived him of his belief in Christianity, which he wanted in the end, and he endeavored to fight back to it, saying if Severn would get him a Jeremy Taylor he thought he could believe; but it was not to be found in Rome. Another time (which is to me peculiarly painful, though it shows at the same time how little way he had proceeded in a particular line of thought), having been betrayed into considerable impatience by bodily and mental anguish, he cried, on recovering himself, 'By God, Severn, a man ought to have some superstition, that he may die decently.'"
Ken (Thomas, Bishop of Bath and Wells, author of several volumes of sermons and of some very beautiful hymns, among which is the famous Doxology. "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow"—the Protestant "Te Deum laudamus"), 1637-1711. "God's will be done."