_An Epitaph_
and _On an Anniversary_ show how early the expectation of death came to
him, for they were made long ago. But the book as a whole is a farewell,
written when life began to slip from him. He was a reserved man, and
wished no doubt by a vague date to hide when still living what he felt
and thought, from those about him. I asked one of the nurses in the
hospital where he died if he knew he was dying, and she said, 'He may
have known it for months, but he would not have spoken of it to anyone.'
Even the translations of poems that he has made his own by putting them
into that melancholy dialect of his, seem to express his emotion at the
memory of poverty and the approach of death. The whole book is of a kind
almost unknown in a time when lyricism has become abstract and
impersonal.

III

Now and then in history some man will speak a few simple sentences which
never die, because his life gives them energy and meaning. They affect
us as do the last words of Shakespeare's people that gather up into
themselves the energy of elaborate events, and they in their turn put
strange meaning into half-forgotten things and accidents, like cries
that reveal the combatants in some dim battle. Often a score of words
will be enough, as when we repeat to ourselves, 'I am a servant of the
Lord God of War and I understand the lovely art of the Muses,' all that
remains of a once famous Greek poet and sea rover. And is not that
epitaph Swift made in Latin for his own tomb more immortal than his
pamphlets, perhaps than his great allegory? 'He has gone where fierce
indignation will lacerate his heart no more.' I think this book too has
certain sentences, fierce or beautiful or melancholy that will be
remembered in our history, having behind their passion his quarrel with
ignorance, and those passionate events, his books.

But for the violent nature that strikes brief fire in _A Question_,
hidden though it was under much courtesy and silence, his genius had
never borne those lion cubs of his. He could not have loved had he not
hated, nor honoured had he not scorned; though his hatred and his scorn
moved him but seldom, as I think, for his whole nature was lifted up
into a vision of the world, where hatred played with the grotesque and
love became an ecstatic contemplation of noble life.

He once said to me, 'We must unite asceticism, stoicism, ecstasy; two of
these have often come together, but not all three:' and the strength
th