The crowning happiness of a happy life was his death in the city he loved so well, in the arms of his dear ones, in the light of a world-wide fame.  The silence to which the most eloquent of us must all one day lapse came upon him like the sudden seductive twilight of the Tropics, and just when he had bequeathed to us one of his finest utterances.

It seems but a day or two ago that the present writer heard from the lips of the dead poet a mockery of death’s vanity—­a brave assertion of the glory of life.  “Death, death!  It is this harping on death I despise so much,” he remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech—­the inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the listener’s knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all so characteristic of him—–­“this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping!  Why should we not change like everything else?  In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death—­call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference—­is upon us.  But what fools who talk thus!  Why, amico mio, you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence.  Without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life.  Pshaw! it is foolish to argue upon such a thing even.  For myself, I deny death as an end of everything.  Never say of me that I am dead!”

On the evening of Thursday, the 12th of December (1889), he was in bed, with exceeding weakness.  In the centre of the lofty ceiling of the room in which he lay, and where it had been his wont to work, there is a painting by his son.  It depicts an eagle struggling with a serpent, and is illustrative of a superb passage in Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam.”  What memories, what deep thoughts, it must have suggested; how significant, to us, the circumstance!  But weak as the poet was, he yet did not see the shadow which had begun to chill the hearts of the watchers.  Shortly before the great bell of San Marco struck ten, he turned and asked if any news had come concerning “Asolando,” published that day.  His son read him a telegram from the publishers, telling how great the demand was and how favourable were the advance-articles in the leading papers.  The dying poet smiled and muttered, “How gratifying!” When the last toll of St. Mark’s had left a deeper stillness than before, those by the bedside saw a yet profounder silence on the face of him whom they loved.

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