Without Lifting A Finger

Who was he? Why was he there? Had he slept there all night long? * 

Just happened to read the stone on De Quincey's left. The white square had helped me find De Quincey. Sad story and probably few details to be had: Rufus Woodward: The Amiable American Stranger. 

Last two strophes of the Tenth Elegy (German/English):   Aber erweckten sie uns, die unendlich Toten, ein Gleichnis, siehe, sie zeigten vielleicht auf die Kätzchen der leeren Hasel, die hängenden, oder meinten den Regen, der fallt auf dunkles Erdreich im Frühjahr. –   Und wir, die an steigendes Glück denken, empfänden die Rührung, die uns beinah bestürzt, wenn ein Glückliches fällt.   ***   But if the endlessly dead woke a symbol in us, see, they would point perhaps to the catkins, hanging from bare hazels, or they would intend the rain, falling on dark soil in Spring-time. –   And we, who think of ascending joy, would feel the emotion, that almost dismays us, when a joyful thing falls.   [Translation by A. S. Kline]  

The Duino Elegies ( German : Duineser Elegien ) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian - Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," [ 1 ] began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855–1934) at Duino Castle , near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea . The poems, 859 lines long in total, [ 2 ] were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During this ten-year period, the elegies languished incomplete for long stretches of time as Rilke suffered frequently from severe depression —some of which was caused by the events of World War I and being conscripted into military service. Aside from brief episodes of writing in 1913 and 1915, Rilke did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed inspiration—writing in a frantic pace he described as a "boundless storm, a...