hose art can show Death lock'd with Life, the cry,
The shuddering moan of poor Laocoon?

_The Sculptor continues to model swiftly while the sitter remains
motionless, watching him._

That's good, sir, good! I'll wait till you have done:
We men of letters are a crabbed race;
Often we're blind with staring at the sun;
And when the evening stars begin their race,
We miss their beauty, we, who creep and run
Like beetles o'er a buried Greek god's face.

I am reluctant to explain one of the main _motifs_ of this young man's
life as "an unfortunate love affair." Indeed, apart from his frank
avowal of the wandering fever in his blood, I am grown to believe that
it was the very reverse of unfortunate for him. It brought him, as
such things do, face to face with Realities, and showed him, sharply
enough, that at a certain point in a man's life there is a Gate,
guarded by the Fates, whose questions he must answer truthfully, or
turn sadly aside into the vague thickets of an aimless existence. And
never did there live a youth more sincere in his thought. I know
nothing more typical of him than his resolute refusal to sit for his
portrait until he had _done_ something memorable. "What!" he would
cry. "Why, the milk-man, who, I heard, has just had twins, is more
worthy of that high honour than I. He has _done_ something in the
world!"

And now he is dead, and doing and not doing are beyond his power. That
the sea whereon he was born should bring him his death was fitting.
Often he would urge his horror, not of death, but of Christian burial.
To be boxed up in the midst of mummeries and lies--he would start up
and pace the floor, the sweat standing on his face. Grimly enough,
Fate took him at his word, flung him suddenly into eternity, the
rushing of the wind his only requiem, the coastwise lights and the
morning star the only watchers of his end.

To the orthodox sentiment sudden death may seem a very horrible sort
of end to a promising life. But, as I sit by my window on the Walk,
while the tides of Thames and traffic flow swiftly by, and the blue
evening mist comes down over the river, transforming dingy wharf and
factory into fairy palace and phantom battlement, it seems to me that
my friend died fitly and well, in the midst of Realities, recking
little that the love he thought secure had passed irrevocably from
him, but never swerving in fidelity to his mistress or devotion to his