The Eastern sage, as he accompanied a monarch through the gorgeous saloons of his palace, said that it had one great defect,――it had no chamber which was death-proof. Adrian found this true in the magnificent pile which he had reared upon the banks of the Tiber. He was taken ill. The disease developed itself in a tormenting dropsy. He had no rest by day, no rest by night. The weary hours were filled with suffering. Remorse was undoubtedly gnawing at his heart. He had known the better way, but had refused to walk in it. Paganism offered him no consolations. Christianity he had rejected. In his anguish he longed to die,――to take that leap in the dark which must be so terrible to any thoughtful man who has not accepted the truth, that life and immortality are brought to light in the gospel. His sufferings were so great, that he begged his friends to kill him,――to present him the poisoned cup, or to plunge the dagger to his heart. But no one was willing to perform that service. He was often heard to exclaim, “How miserable a thing it is to seek death, and not to find it! How strange it is that I, who have put so many others to death, cannot die myself!” Upon this couch of suffering, from which death removed him in the sixty-second year of his age, he wrote the following lines to his departing spirit, so affecting, so melancholy, that they have survived the lapse of eighteen centuries:―― “Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis Quæ nunc abibis in loca, Pallidula, rigida, nudula? Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos.” Prior has endeavored to translate or imitate this stanza in the following lines, which but feebly express the spirit of the original:―― “Poor little, pretty, fluttering thing! Must we no longer live together? And dost thou plume thy trembling wing To take thy flight thou know’st not whither? Thy humorous vein, thy pleasing folly, Lie all neglected, all forgot; And pensive, wavering, melancholy, Thou dread’st and hop’st thou know’st not what.” Adrian appointed Antoninus, a man of singular purity and integrity of character, who was about fifty years of age, to succeed him on the throne. He enjoined it upon him to adopt as his heir Marcus Aurelius, a very beautiful boy of seventeen, whose fascination of character and manners had won the love of the Emperor Adrian.