A Dead Man's Diary by Coulson Kernahan

I pass on now to tell of my death moments. The room in which I died was the room in which I had been born. One half of it was my bedroom, and the other half -- that near the window -- was my study. There I had done all my work, and there were my books and papers. There, too, grouped around the walls, were portraits of the men and women who seem to me sometimes to be more myself, as Emerson puts it, than even I am, and who are nearer to me and dearer to me, many of them, than are some of those who sit daily with me in the household -- I mean the portraits of my favourite writers.

I do not know whether the literary associations of the room had any part -- probably they had -- in determining the current of my thought, but I remember that, during the first few hours of the morning preceding my death, I found my mind running on poets and poetry. I recollect that I was thinking chiefly of Rossetti, and of the fact that he was haunted, as he lay a-dying, by passages from his own poems. Not that I saw or see any cause in that fact for wonder, for I can recall lines of his which I can believe would haunt one even in heaven.