To his mother, to his sister, to Stevenson he writes this recurrent message—the glad tidings of death to come. Man’s life is for him but a child’s wanderings among the shows of a fair:
Till at last,
Tired of experience he turns
To the friendly and comforting breast
Of the old nurse, Death.
And in most of his poems on this theme it seems to be the peace of the grave he desires, not an immortality of new experiences. There is one moving poem, however, dedicating the “windlestraws” of his verse to his wife in which a reference to their dead child suggests that he, too, may have felt the hunger for immortality:
Poor windlestraws
On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time
And Chance and Change, I know!
But they are yours, as I am, till we attain