Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 125.jpg

Rh brought the poet so close to Nature's meanings, were powerless to wrest the secret of physical health. Every normal stimulant seemed at last ineffective; and so it happened that the sad, immemorial story was repeated—the story of which Edgar Poe furnished an even more tragic instance. There is slight call to dwell upon the warfare of these later years, or to remember the darkness which for a time eclipsed the star. For full twelve months before his death Johnson appears to have published nothing; from his nearest friends he became a recluse, and all letters and solicitations were met by silence. But scarcely anyone realised the full pathos of his situation until, on 22 September, 1902, the following note came to the editor of the Academy.

"You last wrote to me some time, I think, in the last century, and I hadn't the grace to answer. But I was in the middle of a serious illness which lasted more than a year, during the whole of which time I was not in the open for even five minutes, and hopelessly crippled in hands and feet. After that long spell of enforced idleness I feel greedy for work."

Accompanying this precious evidence of the star's enduring and prevailing brightness were the lines before mentioned, to the memory of his "unforgettably most gracious friend," Walter Pater. One week later—on the night of 29 September—he left his lodgings at Clifford's Inn for a solitary walk. He never returned. Death, by some inscrutable irony, waited tryst with this high and solitary soul in all the vulgar glare of a way-side "public house." There was a slight fall (slight, indeed, for any other, but not for this tabernacle of wrought ivory), and when the unconscious form was raised, the skull was found hopelessly fractured. Mr. Yeats had said the