A little way apart, shadowed by his name in death no less than in life, lies Stella, the pale, dark-haired child whose wide eyes filled with love as they followed the poor and lonely scholar through stately Shene or the prim rococo epicureanism of Moor Park. She sleeps as she lived, at her master's feet. She dedicated all the days of her life to Swift with a devotion which is wellnigh without a parallel in the history of woman's love for man. Those {237} who stand awe-struck and reverential in the quiet presence of the dead may well feel troubled by a haunting influence in the twilight air of the place. It is the haunting influence of the secret of those two tortured lives, the secret that lies buried between their graves. One forgets for the moment Swift, the fierce fighting statesman, and thinks only of the lonely man who lived to lament for Stella. There has hardly ever been in the world, or out of it, in the illimitable kingdoms of fancy, a more famous pair of lovers than these two. Leila and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet, Petrarch and Laura--repeat what names we may of famous lovers that the fancies of poets have ever adored by the Tigris, or the Avon, or in the shadows of Vaucluse, the names of Swift and Stella are found to appeal no less keenly to heart and brain, to the imagination and to pity. Happy they were not, and could not be. When we read of Swift and Stella the mind naturally turns to that luckless pair of lovers whom Dante saw in the third circle of hell, blown about forever on the racking wind, and finding comfort through the lapse of eternal twilight in the companionship of their common doom. They, too--Swift and Stella--seem driven by the pitiless wind of fate; they have fallen upon evil days; they are greatly gifted, noble, greatly unhappy; they are sustained by their strange, exquisite friendship, by the community of genius, by a tender affection which was out of tune with the time and with their troubled lives. So long as Stella lived Swift was never alone. When she died he was alone till the end. There is nothing in literature more profoundly melancholy than Swift's own eloquent tribute to the memory of his dead wife, written in a room to which he has removed so that he may not see the light burning in the church windows, where her last rites are being prepared. There is no greater and no sadder life in all the history of the last century. The man himself was described in the very hours when he was most famous, most courted, most flattered, as the most unhappy man on earth. Indeed he seems to have been most wretched; he certainly {238} darkened the lives of the two or three women who were so unfortunate as to love him. But we may forget the sadness of the personal life in the greatness of the public career. Swift was the ardent champion of every cause that touched him; the good friend of Ireland; he was always torn with "fierce indignation" against oppression and injustice.