O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms, To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable, And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

For not life’s joys alone I sing, repeating⁠—the joy of death! The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons, Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn’d, or render’d to powder, or buried, My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres, My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

O to attract by more than attraction! How it is I know not⁠—yet behold! the something which obeys none of the rest, It is offensive, never defensive⁠—yet how magnetic it draws.