CHAPTER XVI.
WE RETURN HOME FOR THE LAST TIME.
"Oh, call it by some better name,
For Friendship is too cold;
And Love is now a worldly flame,
Whose shrine is made of gold;
And Passion, like the sun at noon,
Who burns up all he sees
Alike, as warm, will set as soon—
Oh, call it by none of these.
"Imagine something purer far,
More free from stain of clay,
Than Friendship, Love, and Passion are,
Yet human still as they.
And if thy lips, for love like this,
No mortal word can frame.
Go, ask of angels what it is.
And call it by that name!"
The good air in Switzerland, and especially Maloja, had set Richard up completely. We returned on the 7th of September, little thinking he had but six weeks to live.
The day before he died, though he was unusually well and cheerful, he said, "I am beginning to lose the good I got in Switzerland, and to feel the corroding climate of Trieste again. I count the hours till the 15th of November."
This was the day that we were to have sailed for Greece, but, alas! for human foresight, human misery, it was the day of the third and the last great Church ceremonial or dirge for the repose of his soul. Some circumstances that were unavoidable, not important but irritating, for the past few months had annoyed him, and he was always saying, "What a blessing it would be, and that he could hardly wait for the moment, when we two would be settled quietly in England together again, and independent of the Government, and of all the world besides!" And it will always comfort me to remember that during spring and summer, after our return from Algiers, I begged of him to throw up the Service, and instead of going any farther on small travels, to let us at once set to, pack up and return to England for good, and to defer Greece and Constantinople till we had settled ourselves in England. Also that during our Swiss tour, when we got to Zurich in August, and were so near Bâle, I said, "We are halfway to England; let us go on, let the things go; we will send back a trusty person to bring them on;" but he said, "No, he should like to brave it out till the end." Little did we think that—
"The cast-off shape that, years since, we called 'I'
Shall sudden into nothingness
Let out that something rare which could conceive
A Universe and its God."[1]
We had occasion sometimes to go into the English Protestant burial-ground at Trieste—poor Charles Lever lies buried there, and by him is a cold, melancholy corner which at that particular time seemed to be a sort of rubbish corner of stray papers and old tin pots. He shuddered at it, and said, as he had often said before, "If I die here, don't bury me there. They will insist on it; will you be strong and fight against it?" I said, "Yes; I think I shall be strong enough to fight against that for your sake! Where would you like to be buried?" He said, "I think I should like you to take my body out to sea in a boat, and throw me into the water; I don't like the ground, nor a vault, nor cremation." And I said, "Oh, I could not do that; won't anything else do?" "Yes," he said; "I should like us both to lie in a tent side by side."