a dry leathery carcass of a man into whom some one had pumped
strong currents of fresh blood, of abounding life, and of vigorous strength.
I cannot remember when I have felt so crisp, so springy,
and so gloriously unconscious of lungs." During these
intervals of good health he was mentally alert, -- a prodigious worker,
feeling "an immortal and unconquerable toughness of fibre"
in the strings of his heart. There was something more than the cheerfulness
that attends the disease to which he was subject. There was an ardor,
an exuberance that comes only from "a lordly, large compass of soul."
As to his poverty, it must be said that few poets were ever so girt about
with sympathetic relatives and friends, and few men ever knew
how to meet poverty so bravely. He fretted at times
over the irresponsiveness of the public to his work,
but not so much as did his friends, to whom he was constantly
speaking or writing words of encouragement and hope. Criticism taught him
"to lift his heart absolutely above all expectation save that
which finds its fulfillment in the large consciousness of faithful devotion
to the highest ideals in art." "This enables me," he said,
"to work in tranquillity." He knew that he was fighting the battle
which every artist of his type had had to fight since time began.
In his intellectual life he passed through a period of storm and stress,
when he felt "the twist and cross of life", but he emerged into a state
where belief overmasters doubt and he knew that he knew.
He was cheerful in the presence of death, which he held off for eight years
by sheer force of will; at last, when he had wrested from time
enough to show what manner of man he was, he drank down the stirrup-cup
"right smilingly".

Looked at from every possible standpoint, it may be seen
that none of these obstacles could subdue his hopeful and buoyant spirit.