“I kissed thee ere I killed thee: no way but this,—
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.”
Oakes went with him to the train, saw him comfortably installed in the car, and bade him an affectionate good-bye. “Another parting, my friend!” said Forrest: “the last one must come some time. I shall probably be the first to die.” Arriving at the hotel in New York, he ordered a room and a fire, and went to bed, “and lay there thinking,” as he said, “what a pleasant time he was indebted to his friend for in Boston.” He reached home safely on the 9th. Two days he passed in rest, lounging about his library, reading a little, and attending only to a few necessary matters of business. “The time glided away like an ecstatic dream, without any let or hindrance,” he wrote on the 11th to Oakes,—the last letter he ever penned,—closing with the words, “God bless you ever, my dear and much valued friend.”
The earthly finale was at hand. Twenty years before this, in 1852, he wrote to one of his early friends:
“I thank you for your kindness in drinking my health in company with my sisters to-day, the anniversary of my birth. The weather here is gloomy and wears an aspect in accordance with the color of my fate. There is a destiny in this strange world which often decrees an undeserved doom. The ways of Providence are truly mysterious. From boyhood to the present time I have endeavored to walk the paths of honor and honesty with a kindly and benevolent spirit towards all men. And I am not unwilling that my whole course of life should be scrutinized with justice and impartiality. When it shall be so all weighed together I have no fear of the result. And yet I have been fearfully wronged, maligned, and persecuted. I do not, however, lose my faith and trust in that God who will one day hold all men to a strict and sure account. Kind regards to all, and believe me,
“Ever yours,
“Edwin Forrest.”
On the eighth recurrence of the same anniversary after the date of the above sombre epistle—that is, in 1860—he wrote these words: “Friendship is as much prostituted as love. My heart is sick, and I grow aweary of life.” And once more, on the 9th of March, 1871, he set down his feeling in the melancholy sentence, “This is my birthday, another funeral procession in my sad life, and the end not far off.” These expressions reveal the gloomier side of a soul which had its sunny side as well, and the more painful aspect of a life which was also abundantly blessed with wealth, triumphs, and pleasures. But be the outward lot of any man what it may, unless he has communion with God, a love for his fellows that swallows up every hatred, and a firm faith in immortality, the burden of the song of his unsatisfied soul will ever be, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
But sooner or later there is an hour for every earthly vanity to cease. Nothing mortal can escape or be denied the universal fate and boon of death. Its meaning is the same for all, however diverse its disguises or varied its forms. A slave and prisoner, starved and festered in his chains, groaned, as the sweet and strange release came, “How welcome is this deliverance! Farewell, painful world and cruel men!” A Sultan, stricken and sinking on his throne, cried, “O God, I am passing away in the hand of the wind!” A fool, in his painted costume, with his grinning bauble in his hand, said, as he too vanished into the hospitable Unknown, “Alackaday, poor Tom is a dying, and nobody cares. O me! was there ever such a pitiful to-do?” And a Pope, the crucifix lifted before his eyes and the tiara trembling from his brow, breathed his life out in the words, “Now I surrender my soul to Him who gave it!”
The death of a player is particularly suggestive and impressive from the sharp contrast of its perfect reality and sincerity with all the fictitious assumptions and scenery of his professional life. The last drop-scene is the lowering of the eyelid on that emptied ocular stage which in its time has held so many acts and actors. The deaths of many players have been marked by mysterious coincidences. Powell, starting from the bed on which he lay ill, cried, “Is this a dagger which I see before me? O God!”—and instantly expired. Peterson, playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, said,—