I do not know whether the literary associations of the room had any part--probably they had--in determining the current of my thought, but I remember that, during the first few hours of the morning preceding my death, I found my mind running on poets and poetry. I recollect that I was thinking chiefly of Rossetti, and of the fact that he was haunted, as he lay a-dying, by passages from his own poems. Not that I saw or see any cause in that fact for wonder, for I can recall lines of his which I can believe would haunt one even in heaven. Those of my readers who fail to appreciate in its fulness the saying of "Diana of the Crossways" that in poetry "those that have souls meet their fellows," or that of the _Saturday Review_, that "there is an incommunicable magic in poetry which is foolishness to the multitude,"--may think this an exaggeration. Ah well, they are of the "multitude,"--the more pity for them!--and can never understand how the soul is stirred by a simple sentence in the god-like language of Shakespeare, or is as irresistibly swayed as are trees in a whirlwind by a single stanza from Swinburne; how the magic witchery of a couplet by Keats can bring tears to the eyes; or how the tender grace of a line from Herrick can set the senses vibrating with an exquisite thrill of joy. Nay, I could indicate sentences in the diamond-pointed prose of George Meredith, pellucid sentences, crystal-clear and luminous as the scintillations of Sirius (and for all their judicial poise and calmness emitted like the Sirius scintillations at a white heat),--which affect me in a similar way. There are few other writers of whom I could affirm this with the like confidence; but Meredith's thoughts have crystallized into a brain-stimulating prose--every sentence of which is a satisfying mouthful to our intellectual hunger--which is sometimes pure poetry. Poetry is to my diary, however, and in fact to all I think or say, what King Charles's head was to Mr. Dick's memorial, and it is time I returned to my narrative.