The guide tells of a poet above the clouds

I had been re-reading Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads," and reading Mr. Gosse's "Life of Swinburne"; and by a natural transition my mind had wandered away at times to Shelley. That night "my dream was of Swinburne's death. The Guide who was with me had himself seen the end ; and he told me how the poet had died. Death had come to him, the Guide said, in the midst of war, in a battleplane high over the fields of France. He felt sure that a bullet had struck the poet; but almost at the same moment the plane had fallen, diving downwards in flames, burning very fiercely. As he described it he made me see vividly the very scene, and the little bright flames against the sky licking up to the burning wings of the plane as it fell. 'And so,' the Guide said — and his words ran in a sort of chant — 'Swinburne was happy, as Shelley was happy in his death — Sea and Fire for the one — death above the clouds for the other, a soaring death, and for them both at last Fire." '

The dream passed on to other scenes of war in France. Waking from it, it was hard to believe that it was not real, that things had not happened so; and hours afterwards, when I copied out the rough shorthand note of the early morning, it seemed easier to believe in the story as it was told to me than to believe in the end that history records — "the motionless existence of the little old genius, and his little old acolyte, in their dull little villa" at Putney.