“To see the sun shining on its bright grass, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees, which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young children, who, buried there, we might, if we were to die, desire a sleep they seem to sleep.”

All this may have happened, but why need we repine, for as eternal as the sea, as infinite as Nature, and as the phoenix, he revivifying lives, transmigrated and transfused into humanity, for with certainty we know that

    “He lives, he wakes—­’tis Death is dead, not he.”

Immortal amid immortals, his spirit in communion with the Most High, fully conscious in its individuality—­immortal amid mortals, his place need never be refilled, for he stands betwixt the old and the new—­immortal amid the sons of song, do poets still breathe his divine afflatus—­immortal amid philosophers and the regenerators of the race, with Buddha, with Moses, with Socrates, with Mahomet, with Christ—­immortal amid the noble, the virtuous, the good, the wise—­immortal as when living here, for from spirit-spheres we hear him bidding us repeat: 

   “Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
     Far from these carrion-kites that scream below;
    He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
     Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. 
    Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
     Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
    A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
     Through time and change, unquenchably the same,”

* * * * *

   “Peace! peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—­
     He hath awaken’d from the dream of life—­
   ’Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep
     With phantoms an unprofitable strife;
    And in mad trance, strike with our spirits’ knife,
     Invulnerable nothings!”

FINIS CORONAT OPUS.