Meanwhile, in the new cemetery, out along Haddon Avenue beyond the Dominican Convent where dwell the Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary, they had buried the remains of Walt Whitman's body. The hillside above the pool had been covered with folk; and up on the beech-spray over the tomb, the first blue-bird had sung its plaintive-sweet promise of the breaking spring.[775] In the palm-decked white pavilion, with its open sides, the words of the old poet's Chant of Death had mingled with those of the Christ and of the Buddha, and with the half-choked sentences of living lovers and friends. "I felt as if I had been at the entombment of Christ," writes one; and another murmured, "We are at the summit". But the last words had been spoken by Ingersoll--"I loved him living, and I love him still".[776] [Illustration: THE TOMB AT HARLEIGH CEMETERY, 1904] * * * * * "To tell you the truth," writes one who knew him intimately, "I have never had the feeling that Walt Whitman was dead. I think of him as still there, capable of writing to me at any time, and my thoughts often turn to him for his friendly sympathy."[777] It is incredible that any being who has consciously entered upon that life of love which approves itself to the soul as God's own life, can be fundamentally affected by death. What our life is we know not, nor may we speak with any confidence of the nature of the change which we call death; but love we know, and in it, as Ingersoll rightly guessed, is the key to the riddle of mortality. THE END FOOTNOTES: [705] Bucke, 53 n. [706] _In re_, 111. [707] _Ib._, 387. [708] _Ib._, 119; Kennedy, 31. [709] _In re_, 120; Kennedy, 32. [710] Undated news-cutting. [711] _In re_, 119; Kennedy, 58. [712] Kennedy, 32. [713] MSS. Carpenter. [714] Kennedy, 63; _Comp. Prose_, 511 n. [715] Johnston, 88. [716] _Cf._ Calamus, 29. [717] _Songs before Sunrise_, and _Blake, a Critical Essay_; _cf._ _Fortnightly_, xlii., 170. [718] Kennedy, 29; Burroughs (_a_), 54. [719] MSS. Wallace. [720] _L. of G._, 425. [721] I cannot omit some reference to the brilliant and interesting criticism of Whitman by Mr. George Santayana, especially that contained in his _Poetry and Religion_, pp. 175-87, etc., though it is somewhat outside my proper field.