cal attendant was called in. After
consultation they decided that the most eminent surgeons of Paris must
be consulted. It was a decomposition of the whole body, attended with
symptoms rarely observed. The princes of medical science in Paris met at
the bedside. They all confessed that their art was impotent to
alleviate, much less to cure this dreadful disease. Murger's hours were
numbered. The doctors insisted upon his being transported to the
hospital. To the hospital he went: 'twas not for the first,--'twas for
the last time. His agonies were distressing. They wrung from him screams
which could be heard from the fifth floor, where he lay, to the street.
Death made his approaches like some skilful engineer against some
impregnable fortress: fibre by fibre, vein by vein, atom by atom, was
mastered and destroyed.

During one of the rare intervals of freedom from torture, he turned to
the sick-nurse who kept watch by his pillow, and, after vacantly gazing
on her buxom form and ruddy cheek, he significantly asked,--"Mammy, do
you find this world a happy place, and life an easy burden?" The
well-fed woman understood not the bitterness of soul which prompted this
question. "Keep quiet, and sleep," was her reply. He fell back upon his
pillow, murmuring, "_I_ haven't! _I_ haven't!" Yet he was only
eight-and-thirty years old, and men's sorrows commonly commence later in
life. A friend came to see him. As the physicians had forbidden him all
conversation, he wrote on a card this explanation of his
situation:--"Ricord and the other doctors were of opinion that I should
come to Dubois's Hospital. I should have preferred St. Louis's Hospital.
I feel more _at home_ there. _Enfin_!..." Is there in the martyrology of
poets any passage sadder than these lines? Just think of a man so bereft
of home and family, so accustomed to the common cot of the hospital, so
familiar to hospital sights and sounds and odors, that he can associate
home with the public ward! Poor Murger!

So lived and so died the poet of youth, and of ambitious, struggling,
hopeful poverty. We describe not his funeral, nor the monument reared
over his grave. Our heart fails us at sight of these sterile honors.
They are ill-timed. What boot they, when he on whom they are bestowed is
beyond the reach of earthly voices? The ancients crowned the live animal
they selected as the sacrifice for their altars; it saw the garlands of
flowers which were laid on its head, and the