human voice or the rapture of human touch He must go on--on--in these
colorless, shadowless, haunted plains, until the last trumpet-blast
should awaken the echoes of the Universe and summon him to confront
his Maker and be judged Oh! if but once more he could see the earth he
had scorned! Was it spinning on its way still, that dark, tiny ball?
How long since he had given that last glance of farewell? It must
be years and years and years, as reckoned by the time of men, for in
Eternity there is no time. And Sionèd--where was she? Desolate and
abandoned, shrieked at by sudden winds, flying terrified and helpless
over level, horizonless plains only to fling herself upon the grey
waves of Death's noiseless ocean? Oh, if he could but find her and
make her forget! Together, what would matter death and silence and
everlasting unrest? All would be forgot, all but the exquisite pain of
the regret for the years he had wasted on earth, and for the solitary
heritage he had left the world. Those children of his brain! They were
with him still. Would that he had left them below to sing his name
down through the ages! They were a torment to him here, in their
futility and inaction. They could not sing to these shapeless ghosts
about him; their voices would be unheeded music; nor would any strain
sweep downward to that world whose tears he might have drawn, whose
mirth provoked, whose passions played upon at his will. The one grand
thing he had done must alone speak for him. There was in it neither
pathos nor mirth; it had sprung to the cloud-capped point of human
genius, and its sublimity would prove its barrier to the world's
approval. But it would give him fame when--God! what was that thought?
The manuscript of that poem had lain in the room where he had met
his death. Had the hand that had slain him executed a more terrible
vengeance still? Oh, it could not be! No man would be so base. And
yet, what mercy had he the right to expect? And the nature of the
man--cold--relentless--To consign the man who had wronged him to