Troup, Fish, Wolcott, Gouverneur Morris, Rufus King, Bayard, Matthew Clarkson, some twenty of Hamilton’s old friends, were admitted to the death room for a moment.  He could not speak, but he smiled faintly.  Then his eyes wandered to the space behind them.  He fancied he saw the shadowy forms of the many friends who had preceded him:  Laurens, Tilghman, Harrison, Greene, Andre, Sterling, Duane, Duer, Steuben,—­Washington.  They looked at him as affectionately as the living, but without tears or the rigid features of extremest grief.  It is a terrible expression to see on the faces of men long intimate with life, and Hamilton closed his eyes, withdrawing his last glance from Morris and Troup.

Of whom did Hamilton think in those final moments?  Not of Eliza Croix, we may be sure.  Her hold had been too superficial.  Perhaps not even of Elizabeth Schuyler, although he had loved her long and deeply.  What more probable than that his last hour was filled with a profound consciousness of the isolation in which his soul had passed its mortal tarrying?  Surrounded, worshipped, counting more intimate friends sincerely loved than any man of his time, gay, convivial, too active for many hours of introspection, no mortal could ever have stood more utterly alone than Hamilton.  Whether or not the soul is given a sentient immortality we have no means of discovering, but the most commonplace being is aware of that ego which has its separate existence in his brain, and is like to no other ego on earth; and those who think realize its inability to mingle with another.  Hamilton, with his unmortal gifts, his unsounded depths, must have felt this isolation in all its tragic completeness.  There may have been moments when the soul of Washington or Laurens brushed his own.  Assuredly no woman companioned it for a fraction of a second.  Whatever his last thoughts, no man has met his end with more composure.

He died at two o’clock in the afternoon.

XII

The humour and vivacity which had seldom been absent from Hamilton’s face in life withdrew its very impress with his spirit.  His features had something more than the noble repose, the baffling peace, of death; they looked as if they had been cast long ago with the heads of the Caesars.  Gouverneur Morris, staring at him through blistered eyeballs as he lay in his coffin, recalled the history of the House of Hamilton, of its direct and unbroken descent—­through the fortunate, and famed, and crowned of the centuries—­from the Great Constantine, from “The Macedonian,” founder of a dynasty of Roman Emperors, and from the first of the Russian monarchs.  Throughout that history great spirits had appeared from time to time, hewed the foundations of an epoch, and disappeared.  What long-withdrawn creators had met in this exceptionally begotten brain?  Did those great makers of empire, whose very granite tombs were dust, return to earth