uld 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 What long-withdrawn creators had met in this exceptionally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 when their immortal energies were
invoked to create a soul for a nation in embryo? Morris reviewed the
dead man's almost unhuman gift for inspiring confidence, exerted from
the moment he first showed his boyish face to the multitude; for
triumphing to his many goals as if jagged ramparts had been grass under
his feet. He had been the brain of the American army in his boyhood; he
had conceived an empire in his young twenties; he had poured his genius
into a sickly infant, and set it, a young giant, on its legs, when he
was long under twoscore. Almost all things had come to him by intuition,
for he had lived in advance of much knowledge.

He communicated these thoughts to Troup, who left the room with him, his
head bent, his arms hanging listlessly. "He might have come in some le