quem laeseris was never better contravened.  But what we chiefly refer to now is the profound pensiveness of the following strain, as if written with a presentiment of what was not then very far off:—­“Another Finis written; another milestone on this journey from birth to the next world.  Sure it is a subject for solemn cogitation.  Shall we continue this story-telling business, and be voluble to the end of our age?” “Will it not be presently time, O prattler, to hold your tongue?” And thus he ends:—­

“Oh, the sad old pages, the dull old pages; oh, the cares, the ennui, the squabbles, the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again!  But now and again a kind thought is recalled, and now and again a dear memory.  Yet a few chapters more, and then the last; after which, behold Finis itself comes to an end, and the Infinite begins.”

* * * * *

He had been suffering on Sunday from an old and cruel enemy.  He fixed with his friend and surgeon to come again on Tuesday, but with that dread of anticipated pain which is a common condition of sensibility and genius, he put him off with a note from “yours unfaithfully, W.M.T.”  He went out on Wednesday for a little, and came home at ten.  He went to his room, suffering much, but declining his man’s offer to sit with him.  He hated to make others suffer.  He was heard moving, as if in pain, about twelve, on the eve of—­

     “That happy morn
     Wherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal King,
     Of wedded maid and virgin-mother born,
     Our great redemption from above did bring.”

Then all was quiet, and then he must have died—­in a moment.  Next morning his man went in, and opening the windows found his master dead, his arms behind his head, as if he had tried to take one more breath.  We think of him as of our Chalmers, found dead in like manner:  the same childlike, unspoiled, open face; the same gentle mouth; the same spaciousness and softness of nature; the same look of power.  What a thing to think of,—­his lying there alone in the dark, in the midst of his own mighty London; his mother and his daughters asleep, and, it may be, dreaming of his goodness.  God help them, and us all!  What would become of us, stumbling along this our path of life, if we could not, at our utmost need, stay ourselves on Him?

Long years of sorrow, labor, and pain had killed him before his time.  It was found after death how little life he had to live.  He looked always fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost infantine face, but he was worn to a shadow, and his hands wasted as if by eighty years.  With him it is the end of Ends; finite is over and, infinite begun.  What we all felt and feel can never be so well expressed as in his own words of sorrow for the early death of Charles Buller:—­