And that again reminds us, with a difference—the difference between Madame de Staël and the sweet singer of the “Christian Year,”—of Corinne on her death-bed, saying to Castel Forte: “But for you, I should die alone. There is no help for such a moment; friends can but follow us to the brink; there begin thoughts too deep, too troublous, to be confided.” _Mon sort est de mourir seul_, writes Rousseau’s bereaved Solitaire; _et la seule Providence me fermera les yeux_. Scott was not of mere imagination all compact when he made Edie Ochiltree say, in the cave that forms the old mendicant’s favourite retreat, “I hae had mony a thought, that when I found myself auld and forfairn, and no able to enjoy God’s blessed air ony langer, I wad e’en streek mysell out here, and abide my removal, like an auld dog that trails its useless ugsome carcass into some bush or bracken.” Montaigne says that, might he have his choice, he thought he should like best to die out of his own house, and away from his own people. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, on the seventh day of his last illness, admitted none but his unworthy son (Commodus) to his chamber, and after a few words dismissed him, “covered his head for sleep, and”—in Dean Merivale’s words—“passed away alone and untended.” Epigrammatic historians love to tell of Catherine the Great, who had reigned over five hundred and forty towns, over forty-two governments, over a multitude of isles of the sea from Kamschatka to Japan, and over eighty millions of slaves, that she died alone, entirely alone, without a single slave at hand to support her drooping head. The picture is meant to be sensational, and as written in French and for the French, it may be telling enough. It tells, for instance, upon such a nature as Madame Sophie Gay, who used to promise her friends to come and die among them, when it was her turn and her time; adding, in her very French style, “Je ne veux pas que cette demoiselle”—meaning _la mort_—“me trouve seule.” Upon others, the grand climax of supreme solitude fails of effect. “It has always been my wish,” writes Southey, for example, “to die far from my friends, to crawl like a dog into some corner and expire unseen. I would neither give nor receive unavailing pain.” When death overtook St. Francis Xavier, he was on board of a vessel bound for Siam, and at his own request he was removed to the shore, that he might die with the greater composure. Stretched on the naked beach, with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains—thus Sir James Stephen describes his last moments—he contended alone with the agonies of the fever which wasted his vital power. “It was an agony and a solitude for which the happiest of the sons of men might well have exchanged the dearest society, and the purest of the joys of life.... It was a solitude thronged by blessed ministers of peace and consolation, visible in all their bright and lovely aspects to the now unclouded eye