“And then—he died. Behold before ye Humanity’s poor sum and story; Life—death—and all that is of glory.” And again, in the same poet’s chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered with a deep consummate skill—is followed by one beginning, “But—he died! and he was buried In his tomb of sculptured stone,” etc. And once again, in one of this author’s dramatic fragments is sketched the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a “foiled potentiality”—of one who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic reality and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would have been— _B._ “A king? _A._ A _man_! what else, King, emperor, tyrant, shah, would matter not. He would have been—a name; such as of old Grew into gods! _B._ And so he died? _A._ He died.” Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most musical, most melancholy, of the laureate, “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground; Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath; And after many a summer dies the swan.”