“She set as sets the morning star, which goes
     Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
     Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
     But melts away into the light of heaven.”

THE DEATH OF THACKERAY

From ‘Spare Hours’

We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he was walking with two friends along the Dean road, to the west of Edinburgh,—­one of the noblest outlets to any city.  It was a lovely evening,—­such a sunset as one never forgets:  a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky.  The northwest end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky.  All three gazed at it silently.  As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word “CALVARY!” The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things.  All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things,—­of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Savior.

There is a passage at the close of the ‘Roundabout Paper’ No. 23, ’De Finibus,’ in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked; the whole paper is like a soliloquy.  It opens with a drawing of Mr. Punch, with unusually mild eye, retiring for the night; he is putting out his high-heeled shoes, and before disappearing gives a wistful look into the passage, as if bidding it and all else good-night.  He will be in bed, his candle out, and in darkness, in five minutes, and his shoes found next morning at his door, the little potentate all the while in his final sleep.  The whole paper is worth the most careful study; it reveals not a little of his real nature, and unfolds very curiously the secret of his work, the vitality and abiding power of his own creations; how he “invented a certain Costigan, out of scraps, heel-taps, odds and ends of characters,” and met the original the other day, without surprise, in a tavern parlor.  The following is beautiful:  “Years ago I had a quarrel with a certain well-known person (I believed a statement regarding him which his friends imparted to me, and which turned out to be quite incorrect).  To his dying day that quarrel was never quite made up.  I said to his brother, ’Why is your brother’s soul still dark against me? It is I who ought to be angry and unforgiving, for I was in the wrong.’” Odisse