"So our lord Buddha having all the depths Sounded unto their nethermost, and scaled Unto their topmost all the soaring heights, Of thought and being, like a weaver's shuttle To and fro passing, and found naught at all The substance and the basis of the world, Himself at last absorbed in the abyss Escaped existence and sank into peace." The lamps had burned to low, and some of them Had flickered to a fall, while Krishna spoke-- Their fumy flames meanwhile blurring the air To dimness deepened with the deepening night. The stillness of the room was audible, Accented by the murmurous monotone Of Krishna's muffled, bland, and inward voice. The strange, far-off, unreal, unthinkable Last things he told involved the laboring mind Too, in a sense confused of cloud and dark. When he ceased speaking, with that word pronounced, "Peace," like a hollow sphere of sound, no core, It was as if, with that for spell outbreathed, Nirvâna softly would engulf them all. But one was there to whom such spell was naught. "'Peace,'" Publius said, reechoing the word, As pondering what the purport of it was, "'Peace,' I should think must be a euphemism, As the Greeks say when they avoid a name, The right name, for a thing to be avoided. There is no peace, unless there be some one To have the peace; but Buddha then was not, Had vanished like a breath breathed on the air, If of his end I have understood thee right." "Thou hast not misunderstood," said Krishna; "yet We shrink from saying of Buddha, 'He is not.' We sheathe the sense, and softly say instead, 'He has ceased to suffer,' 'He has touched the goal.' Himself he would not say, 'I shall not be;' But if he taught us true that life is woe, Then not to suffer, needs is not to live: Save not to live, salvation there is none."