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Rh epitaph he so often told me with an ironic smile he had chosen for his own was not, however, used. Talk, he always declared, vain, excessive talk, lay at the bottom of every misunderstanding in the world. If people would talk less, there would be less trouble in life. "Sorry I spoke," was to be cut upon one of his tombstones; "Sorry they spoke" upon the other.

A poem he wrote—published, like the Night Song, in Harper's Magazine—describing death, I have kept all these years. The strange intensity of expression he put into the passage which begins: "The sand of my Being is fused and runs lives in my mind to this day. The title of the poem was "The Final Word":

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