Poverty, the faithful companion of his youth, dung to him to the end. Even during the last years he was often in monetary difficulties; in his attacks upon the powers of the day he had no thought of what the morrow would bring to him. He had again and again to pay the penalty of speaking unpopular truths. And when money came his way he did not love it well enough to make it stay with him. He gave with a lavish, careless hand, with a heart ever warm and bleeding for those who had less than he. When, on his last birthday, a purse containing 50,000 kronor had been presented to him, as a token of the people's love and admiration, he gave away large sums to the cause of peace, to the poor. When, at last, a great publisher bought the rights of all his published works in Sweden for some £11,000, the affluence came too late--for him. In 1901 he married Harriet Bosse who had been the sympathetic interpreter on the stage of the women in some of his plays. The marriage was amicably dissolved in 1904. During his third marriage he wrote _The Dance of Death_ and _Swanwhite_, and published a volume of poems, in which his lyrical powers were perfected through greater sensitiveness and restraint. Among these poems there is one, strange and beautiful, spiritual and earthly, in which he sings of the glory of the form of woman--the theme of artists and lovers since the beginning of time--but here treated in a new manner. In her he sees the motion of stars and planets, the lines of sphere, parabola and ellipse. He sees the infinite possibilities of the Cosmic procession, of the creative, ever-moving force, the highest and the lowest, in the symbol of the eternally feminine. The "music of the spheres" has been captured in this little poem. It is strange how often one is constrained to use musical metaphors in describing Strindberg's style. There is always music in his language. He was conscious of this himself, for in his last plays he always chose music to fit the mood of his dramatic movement. Thus the spiritual peace of _Easter_, the change from fear of fate to certainty of God's presence, is accompanied by Haydn's _Sieben Worte des Erlösers_, the sinful thoughts of Maurice and Henriette in _There are Crimes and Crimes_ are followed by the finale of Beethoven's Sonata in D minor. _The Dream Play_ is interluded with Bach's Toccata con Fuga; the _Dance of Death_ is trodden to the tune of the "Entry of the Boyars." Over his piano there hung a death-mask of Beethoven. The final movement of the "Moonlight Sonata" was to him the highest interpretation of humanity's yearning for deliverance. Music brought him peace. It gave him strength when words failed--even during the last days when he sat at his piano, improvising variations on the Death hymn of the Titanic. Strindberg's old friend Tor Aulin, the well-known Swedish composer, received a characteristic message from Strindberg's deathbed: "A last farewell from Saul to David."