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And as the tumult raged, the smoke of battle gave me opportunity to slip away. I crossed the street, turned down one block, and entered Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.

Great, roomy, gloomy, solemn temple, where the rumble of city traffic is deadened to a faint hum:

“Without, the world’s unceasing noises rise,
Turmoil, disquietude and busy fears;
Within, there are the sounds of other years,
Thoughts full of prayer and solemn harmonies
Which imitate on earth the peaceful skies.”

Other worshipers were there. Standing beside a great stone pillar I could make them out kneeling on the tiled floor. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the subdued light, and right at my feet I saw a large brass plate set in the floor and on it only this:

Swift
Died Oct. 19, 1745
Aged 78

On the wall near is a bronze tablet, the inscription of which, in Latin, was dictated by Swift himself:

“Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral, where fierce indignation can no longer rend his heart. Go! wayfarer, and imitate, if thou canst, one who, as far as in him lay, was an earnest champion of liberty—-“

Above this is a fine bust of the Dean, and to the right is another tablet:

“Underneath lie interred the mortal remains of Mrs. Hester Johnson, better known to the world as ‘Stella,’ under which she is celebrated in the writings of Doctor Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral. She was a person of extraordinary endowments and accomplishments, in body, mind and behavior; justly admired and respected by all who knew her, on account of her eminent virtues as well as for her great natural and acquired perfections.”

These were suffering souls and great. Would they have been so great had they not suffered? Who can tell? Were the waters troubled in order that they might heal the people?

Did Swift misuse this excellent woman, is a question that has been asked and answered again and again.

A great author has written:

“A woman, a tender, noble, excellent woman, has a dog’s heart. She licks the hand that strikes her. And wrong nor cruelty nor injustice nor disloyalty can cause her to turn.”

Death in pity took Stella first; took her in the loyalty of love and the fulness of faith from a world which for love has little recompense, and for faith small fulfilment.

Stella was buried by torchlight, at midnight, on the Thirtieth day of January, Seventeen Hundred Twenty-eight. Swift was sick at the time, and wrote in his journal: “This is the night of her funeral, and I am removed to another apartment that I may not see the light in the church which is just over against my window.” But in his imagination he saw the gleaming torches as their dull light shone through the colored windows, and he said, “They will soon do as much for me.”

But seventeen years came crawling by before the torches flared, smoked and gleamed as the mourners chanted a requiem, and the clods fell on the coffin, and their echoes intermingled with the solemn voice of the priest as he said, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”

In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five, the graves were opened and casts taken of the skulls. The top of Swift’s skull had been sawed off at the autopsy, and a bottle in which was a parchment setting forth the facts was inserted in the head that had conceived “Gulliver’s Travels.”

I examined the casts. The woman’s head is square and shapely. Swift’s head is a refutation of phrenology, being small, sloping and ordinary.

The bones of Swift and Stella were placed in one coffin, and now rest under three feet of concrete, beneath the floor of Saint Patrick’s.

So sleep the lovers joined in death.