Cecil Rhodes -Dead.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume VII, Issue 2, 1 November 1902, Page 107

Cecil Rhodes -Dead.

Grim lip, sardonic eye, blank forehead, he has gone : The domineering life has bent to one behest ! Dead the stupendous energy that drove him on ; That throbbing dynamo, his brain, has droned to rest ! Huge, callous, elemental, massive, crude, Through dallying life hurried this stark, inhuman thing ! Nor once he turned his head, nor once his keen eyes viewed The pleasaut gardens by the wayside blossoming ! He lacked the human part. Ah, wonder ! if he yearned Sometimes to leap the barriers of that prison brain, Just once to kiss some mouth and know that kiss returned, In one deep reckless gulp the all of life to drain ! There was no hope for him but in eternal strife ; All would bave still been barren had he all achieved ! His acrid strenuous madness held him fast; all life Was his for happy guerdon — and he never lived ! Some calm ironic fate held him ever apart. Life laughed by in the sunlight — he in vast eclipse ! Nor mined the gold deep hidden in a human heart, Nor guessed the opulence of a mere woman's lips ! What cosmic warfare, unimaginable strife, Waits in the vague beyond for that unvanquished mind ? Too mean for him the little margins of this life — Into the quiet dark gone untamed, breathless, blind ! • Arthur H. Adams.