the shadowy porch. A taller tree stands sentinel at the gate, as if to
guard the poet-soul from the world and close it around with the beauty
that it loved.

But life did not bring him any more of joy or success than he had
achieved in the long years of toil and sorrow and disappointment,
brightened by the flame of his own genius throwing upon the dark wall
of existence the pictures that imagination drew with magic hand upon
his sympathetic, ever responsive mind. On the sixth of October, after
that month of iridescent beauty on Copse Hill, came the days of which
he had written long before:

As it purples in the zenith,
As it brightens on the lawn,
There's a hush of death about me,
And a whisper, "He is gone!"

On Copse Hill, "Under the Pine," his lifelong friend stood and
sorrowfully questioned:

O Tree! have not his poet-touch, his dreams
So full of heavenly gleams,
Wrought through the folded dulness of thy bark,
And all thy nature dark
Stirred to slow throbbings, and the fluttering fire
Of faint, unknown desire?

Near the end of his last visit he had told Paul Hayne that he did not
wish to live to be old--"an octogenarian, far less a centenarian,
like old Parr." He hoped that he might stay until he was fifty or