'_Duke._ Deceived and disappointed vain desires! Why laugh I not, and ridicule myself? 'Tis still, and cold, and nothing in the air But an old grey twilight, or of eve or morn I know not which, dim as futurity, And sad and hoary as the ghostly past Fills up the space. Hush! not a wind is there, Not a cloud sails over the battlements, Not a bell tolls the hour. Is there an hour? Or is not all gone by which here did hive Of men and their life's ways? Could I but hear The ticking of a clock, or someone breathing, Or e'en a cricket's chirping, or the grating Of the old gates amid the marble tombs, I should be sure that this was still the world. Hark! Hark! Doth nothing stir? No light, and still no light, besides this ghost That mocks the dawn, unaltered? Still no sound? No voice of man? No cry of beast? No rustle Of any moving creature? And sure I feel That I remain the same: no more round blood drops Roll joyously along my pulseless veins: The air I seem to breathe is still the same: And the great dreadful thought that now comes o'er me Must remain ever as it is, unchanged. This moment doth endure for evermore; Eternity hath overshadowed time; And I alone am left of all that lived.' _Death's Jest Book_, act iii., sc. 3. The writer of these lines might have been a great tragic poet, if he could have achieved the construction of a coherent plot. Congreve might have been a greater, but for the conventions of an age that required his _dramatis personae_ to be remote by a thousand years or a thousand miles.