hen life is strongest and passion
is at its height; to avoid the terrors of expectation and escape the
lingering paraphernalia of sick chambers and deathbed scenes; to shirk
the stuffy and inactive hours, marked by nothing but medicines and
unwelcome meals; to elude the doctor's feigned encouragements, the
sympathy of relations anxious to resume their ordinary pursuits, the
buzzing of the parson in the ear, the fading of the casement into that
"glimmering square"--should we not all go a long way round to seek so
merciful a deliverance? "I will not die in my bed like a cow!" cried the
Northumbrian king, and was set on his feet in full armour to confront
the Arch Fear face to face. There was some poor comfort in a pose like
that; it was better than our helpless collapse into a middle-aged
cradle, with pap-boat for feeding-bottle, and a last sleep in the
nurse's arms, younger and less muscular than our own. But how much finer
to die like Romeo with a kiss, quick as the true apothecary's drugs; to
sink like Shelley in the blue water, with mind still full of the Greek
poet whom he tucked against his heart; to pass hot with fever, like
Byron, from the height of fame, while thunder presaged to the
mountaineers the loss of their great champion in freedom's war!

There is no question of it; these are axioms that all mankind is agreed
upon. Every mortal soul would choose a quick and impassioned death; all
admire a certain recklessness, an indifference to personal safety or
existence, especially in the old, to whom recklessness is most natural,
since they have less of life to risk. That was why the crowd cheered
Mr. James Tomkinson as he trotted to the starting-post, and that was why
everybody envied his rapid and victorious end. In his _Tales from a
Field Hospital_, Sir Frederick Treves told of a soldier who was brought
down from Spion Kop as a mere fragment, his limbs shattered, his face
blown away, incapable of speech or sight. When asked if he had any
message to send home before he died, he wrote upon the paper, "Did we
win?" In those words lives the very spirit of that enviable death which
all men think they long for--the death which takes no thought of self,
and swallows up fear in victory. Such a man Stevenson would have
delighted to include in his brave roll-call, and of him those final,
well-known words in _Aes Triplex_ might have been written:

"In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being,
he pass