Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had not realized itself to him in season.  To be sure, he was able, long after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed to death between a moving train and such an archway.

Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities in the world,

     “In life’s morning march when his bosom was young,”

and when infinitely less would have sated him.  Now death has come to join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that blithe spirit is elsewhere.  But nothing can take from him who remains the witchery of that most winning presence.  Still it looks smiling from the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.  Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer’s sense is rapt with the mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other.

[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes:  a great poet writes the best prose.  D.W.]

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

   Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
   Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
   Couldn’t fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
   Death’s vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
   Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
   Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
   Express the appreciation of another’s fit word
   Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
   Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
   His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
   His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
   Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
   Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
   Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
   Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
   Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
   Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
   Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
   So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
   Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens