It was in this way began a friendship that has always seemed to me marvellous, and that lasted till his death in England some fifteen years later. Sweet, patient, resigned and lovable to the end, he died incurably insane, the charity in him never tainted, the tenderness unstained, the passionate love of his kind, of beauty, of all that is lovely and of good report, unspoilt. The grimmest pain had not soured the natural sweetness in him, his gentle spirit knew no bitterness, his megalomania, complicated, I believe, with other varieties of disorder, was harmless and inoffensive. As Padre he still lives in my memory; as The Old Man of Visions (“The Listener”), he still haunts my imagination. “You have taken my name away,” he chided me with a smile, when I published this picture of him. “I am now uncertain who I am. That is well. I am Anybody I choose to be. I will be Everybody.” He had rooms in Great Russell Street at the time. Though baptised by Charles Kingsley into the English Church, he later became a Roman Catholic, but, when the end came, he reverted to the blood and faith born in him. He was buried, by his own wish, in a Hebrew cemetery. The epitaph he so often told me with an ironic smile he had chosen for his own was not, however, used. Talk, he always declared, vain, excessive talk, lay at the bottom of every misunderstanding in the world. If people would talk less, there would be less trouble in life. “Sorry I spoke,” was to be cut upon one of his tombstones; “Sorry they spoke” upon the other. A poem he wrote--published, like the Night Song, in _Harper’s Magazine_--describing death, I have kept all these years. The strange intensity of expression he put into the passage which begins: “The sand of my Being is fused and runs ...” lives in my mind to this day. The title of the poem was “The Final Word”: Hence then at last! For the strife is past Of the Birth and Death, of the Self and Soul; The memory breaks, the breath forsakes, The waves of the æther o’er me roll. The pulses cease, and the Hours release Their wearied school of the nerves and brain; I fall on the Deep of the Mystic Sleep, Where the Word that is Life can be heard again. And the fires descend, and my fragments blend, And the sand of my Being is fused and runs To the mould of a glass for the rays to pass Of the Sun of the centre that rules all suns. But, or ever I rest, I take from my breast My blood-drained heart for the tablet white Of a gospel page to the far-off Age-- O Hand eternal!--Come forth--and write! CHAPTER XXX