Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/159

 BLAINE

With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the Divine decree.

As the end drew near his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from his prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of the heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With a wan, fevered face, tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing wonders; on its far sails; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun ; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon ; on the serene and shining pathway of the star. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic mean- ing which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves break- ing on a further shore and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morn- ing.

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