Measuring a space
adjusted to the proportions of his person, he inquired anxiously for any
loose fragments of marble, such as might suffice to line it. He requested
also to be furnished with wood and water, as the materials for the last
sepulchral rites. And these labors were accompanied, or continually
interrupted by tears and lamentations, or by passionate ejaculations on
the blindness of fortune, in suffering so divine an artist to be thus
violently snatched away, and on the calamitous fate of musical science,
which then stood on the brink of so dire an eclipse. In these moments he
was most truly in an _agony_, according to the original meaning of
that word; for the conflict was great between two master principles of his
nature: on the one hand, he clung with the weakness of a girl to life,
even in that miserable shape to which it had now sunk; and like the poor
malefactor, with whose last struggles Prior has so atrociously amused
himself, "he often took leave, but was loath to depart." Yet, on the other
hand, to resign his life very speedily, seemed his only chance for
escaping the contumelies, perhaps the tortures, of his enemies; and, above
all other considerations, for making sure of a burial, and possibly of
burial rites; to want which, in the judgment of the ancients, was the last
consummation of misery.
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