The possibility of a fatal ending to my illness had never occurred to myself or to my family, until that ending was nigh at hand, and so it was that death came upon me in every way unawares. I remember my father bending over me, and asking gently if I knew that I was dying, and I recollect looking up to whisper back, "No: is it so?" and receiving his sorrowful response. It was too late then for me to do more than recognise the fact as a fact, for my brain was so strangely affected that I was utterly incapable of following out that fact to its result. I knew that I was dying--knew it much as I might have known it of some other person--but felt no individual pang of terror or surprise. This state of indifferent acquiescence in that which was about to occur was followed by a sense of regret at having to leave a volume which I had in hand unfinished, and then, with the ruling passion strong in death, I found myself endeavouring to find fitting words to describe my sensations. It is so with me ever and always. Art and Poetry have become such realities, that I cannot take them up and lay them aside at pleasure, but must needs bear them with me whithersoever I go. I carry my poetry with me to bed and to breakfast; and I can sit and write, or carry on a conversation, with the consciousness of Mr. Lang's latest _Ballade_, or Mr. Theodore Watts's last sonnet, running like an undercurrent in my mind. I am perpetually striving to fix in language the fleeting colours of sea and sky. I can never listen to the trickle and purl of a brooklet tinkling over its pebbly bed, without making diligent search in my vocabulary for a word--the golden word--which seems most to babble and to blab of water. As surely as I find in Wordsworth's poems a background of sky and mountain, just as surely do I find in mountain and sky an echo of Wordsworth's song. To me, too, the sonnet which rises involuntarily to my lips, as I gaze out upon the deep, is as much a part of the scene before me, as is the sun or the sand upon the shore; and I have come to feel with Mr. Lowell, as if a sunset were "like a quotation from Dante or Milton," and that "if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean."