Thackeray was found dead in his bed on Christmas morning, and he probably died without pain. His mother and his daughters were sleeping under the same roof when he passed away alone. Dickens told me that, looking on him as he lay in his coffin, he wondered that the figure he had known in life as one of such noble presence could seem so shrunken and wasted; but there had been years of sorrow, years of labor, years of pain, in that now exhausted life. It was his happiest Christmas morning when he heard the Voice calling him homeward to unbroken rest.
HAWTHORNE.
A hundred years ago Henry Vaughan seems almost to have anticipated Hawthorne's appearance when he wrote that beautiful line,
"Feed on the vocal silence of his eye."
III. HAWTHORNE.
I am sitting to-day opposite the likeness of the rarest genius America has given to literature,—a man who lately sojourned in this busy world of ours, but during many years of his life
"Wandered lonely as a cloud,"—