Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1901 — Last Hoars of Great Men. [ARTICLE]

Last Hoars of Great Men.

No life had more in it of terror than Napoleon’s, yet he said, on his dying bed: ’’There is nothing terrible in death; he has been my pillow for the last three weeks, and now he is about to take me away forever.” Louis XIV was happy in his death. ‘‘Why weep you?” he asked his friends. “Did you think I should live forever? I thought dying had been harder?” Sir Philip Sidney would not change the joy of his last hour for “the empire of the world.” "Let me fall asleep to the sound of delicious music,” said Mirabeau; and Humboldt, the naturalist, exclaimed in his dying peace: “How grand these rays! They seem to beckon earth to heaven.” Sir William Hunter wanted, a pen “to write down how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die.” But surely the most beautiful farewell ever - addressed to the world was that of Keats. “I feel the flowers growing over me,” he said in a phrase which, as a thing of beauty, is a joy for ever.