obscurity, which sometimes stray
pilgrims from across the seas strain their sight to decipher in the
gloom, is the self-uttered epitaph of Jonathan Swift. We may translate
it thus into English: "Here resteth the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of
this Cathedral Church, where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart
no longer. Go, traveller, imitate if thou canst a champion, strenuous
to his uttermost, of liberty."

A little way apart, shadowed by his name in death no less than in life,
lies Stella, the pale, dark-haired child whose wide eyes filled with
love as they followed the poor and lonely scholar through stately Shene
or the prim rococo epicureanism of Moor Park. She sleeps as she lived,
at her master's feet. She dedicated all the days of her life to Swift
with a devotion which is wellnigh without a parallel in the history of
woman's love for man. Those {237} who stand awe-struck and reverential
in the quiet presence of the dead may well feel troubled by a haunting
influence in the twilight air of the place. It is the haunting
influence of the secret of those two tortured lives, the secret that
lies buried between their graves. One forgets for the moment Swift,
the fierce fighting statesman, and thinks only of the lonely man who
lived to lament for Stella.

There has hardly ever been in the world, or out of it, in the
illimitable kingdoms of fancy, a more famous pair of lovers than these
two. Leila and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet, Petrarch and Laura--repeat
what names we may of famous lovers that the fancies of poets have ever
adored by the Tigris, or the Avon, or in the shadows of Vaucluse, the
names of Swift and Stella are found to appeal no less keenly to heart
and brain, to the imagination and to pity. Happy they were not, and
could not be. When we read of Swift and Stella the mind naturally
turns to that luckless pair of lovers whom Dante saw in the third
circle of hell, blown about forever on the racking wind, and finding
comfort through the lapse of eternal twilight in the companionship of
their common doom. They, too--Swift and Stella--seem driven by the
pitiless wind of fate; they have fallen upon evil days; they are
greatly gifted, noble, greatly unhappy; they are sustained by their
strange, exquisite friendship, by the community of genius, by a tender
affection which was out of tune with the time and with their troubled
lives. So long as Stella lived Swift was never alone. When she died
he wa