tream of promotion rolled
on, knowing well that it would roll on _in omne aevum_, and not caring
a jot whether it did, or did not. What was a seat at the Sadr
Board[BB] to him, a seat among the solemn mummies of the service? He
would not object to lie in the same graveyard with them; but to sit at
the same board while this sensible warm motion of life still continued
was too much; this could never be. He belonged to a higher order of
spirits. As a boy he had not bartered the music of his soul for
Eastern languages and the Rent Law; and as an old man he would not sit
in state with corpses faintly animated by rupees.

To the last he mocked promotion; he mocked, till the dread mocker laid
mocking fingers on his liver, and till gibe and laughter were silenced
for evermore. So the Collector died, the merry Collector; and "where
shall we bury the merry Collector?" became the last problem for his
friends to deal with. I was in far away lands at the time with another
friend of his--we mourned for the Collector.

We would have buried him in soft summer weather under sweet arbute
trees, near the shore of some murmuring Italian sea. The west wind
should whisper its grief over his grave for ever:--

"Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers."

Blue-eyed girls have bound his dear head with garlands of the amorous
rosemary. The echoes of sea-caves would have chanted requiems until
time should be no more. Embalmed in darkness the nightingale would
nightly for ever pour forth her soul in profuse strains of
inconsolable ecstasy; by day the dove should moan in the flickering
shade until the sun should cease to roll on his fiery path:--

"Where through groves deep and high,
Sounds the far billow,
Where early violets die under the willow.
There, through the summer day,
Cool streams are laving;
There, while the tempests sway,
Scarce are boughs waving;
There thy rest should'st thou take,
Parted for ever,
Never again to wake: never, O never!"

With tender hand we would have traced on his memorial urn some
valediction--not without hope--of love and friendship.

It was otherwise. He was