ITALY DEATH OF HIS FATHER 301 



help the world held for him. Yet now that it has come I feel as if much of 

 the good of life has gone with him. Time will wear this down, nothing is 

 permanent with man, still a great change will always rest upon our lives 

 who knew him for father. ... I cannot thank you enough for your cease- 

 less kindness in our great trial. 



To his mother : 



FLORENCE, ITALY, Jan. 18, 1882. 



I would that I could have been with you when the end came. I have never 

 so grieved over our parting as I have done this day. I hope you will make 

 nothing of the distance, but let me come to you if I can be of any comfort 

 to you. ... I so hope that the end was in peace and that you have courage 

 to bear the blow. I know that it will be hard to bear, for I feel myself that it 

 is a sore trial, though we have so long awaited it and know so well that it is 

 for the best. Let us take heart in the surety of that meeting beyond the 

 earth that should help us to bear all partings here. When we parted, he 

 told me that he longed for the end that he might no longer suffer from the 

 confusion of mind that beset him. . . . 



In his books Mr. Shaler ordinarily wrote so philosophically of 

 death that to those who knew his devoted nature, it seemed 

 almost as if upon such occasions he made an effort to chill his 

 deeper emotions. It must be said, however, that in the course 

 of his life he had been called upon to mourn those only, who, 

 either because of disease or the limitations of years, had ended 

 their days at a timely moment. For all the largeness of his 

 conception of life and death we can but believe that, in face of 

 the supreme bereavement, philosophy would have been to him, 

 as to others, a cold comforter. In other words, when the man 

 of science holds the pen there is a sense of the sufficiency of 

 philosophy, but when the poet writes there is the cry of the 

 heart. In his "Elizabeth" he speaks of 



That sorrow vast and vain for ages gone 

 For beauty turned to dust ; for voices still 

 That waked forgotten love to ecstasy, 

 For all the souls we know kin to our own 

 With whom we never can exchange a cry 

 Across the gulf that parts us. 



