was absent, and his anguish at the news was curiously mingled with an overwhelming dread lest she should die at the deanery, and thus compromise her reputation and his own; perhaps, too, lest the house to which he must return should be made intolerable to him by the shadow of such an event. That he should have kept away, with his usual terror of everything painful, was entirely in keeping with his character. But the first alarm passed away, and Swift was in the deanery when this great sorrow overtook him. He who had kept a letter for an hour without daring to open it, in which he trembled to find the news of her death, now shut himself up heartbroken in his solitary house, and, somewhat calmed by the irrevocable,--as grief, however desperate, always must be,--proceeded to give himself what consolation was possible by writing a “Character,” as was the fashion of the time, of “the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with.” The calm after the storm, but a calm of sober despair and dread, unreal composure, is in this strange document. He wrote till “my head aches, and I can write no more,” and on the third day resumed and completed the strange and melancholy narrative. This is the night of her funeral, which my sickness will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed into another apartment, that I may not see the light in the Church, which is just over against the window of my bedchamber. She was buried in his own cathedral by torchlight, as the custom was; but he would no more bear the glimpses of that awful light through the window, than he could witness the putting away of all that remained of Stella in the double gloom of the vault and the night. In that other apartment he concluded his sad panegyric, the story of all she was and did, showing with intense but subdued eloquence that there was no fault in her. “There is none like her, none.” This is the burden of the old man’s self-restrained anguish, the tragedy of his age, as it is the young lover’s pæan of triumph. The truest, most valuable friend that ever man had--and now her beautiful life was ended, to be his consolation no more. He had a lock of her hair in his possession somewhere, either given him then or at some brighter moment, which was found after his death, as all the world knows, with these words written upon the paper that contained it: “Only a woman’s hair.” Only all the softness, the brightness, the love and blessing of a life; only all that the heart had to rest upon of human solace; only that--no more. He who had thanked God and M. D.’s prayers for his better health, had now no one to pray for him, or to receive his confidences. It was over, all that best of life--as if it had never been.