Title: Famous Last Words | Academy of American Poets
Headings: Famous Last Words
Famous Last Words
Content: Byron died on April 19, 1824. Lewis Carroll: “ Take away those pillows. I shall need them no more.” At age sixty-five, Carroll was strong and in good health; in 1897, after undertaking a twenty-mile walk between Eastbourne and Hastings, he said, “I was hardly at all tired and not at all foot sore.” During Christmas of that year, he came down with what he described in a letter to his sister as a “feverish cold, of the bronchial type” that eventually worsened and turned into pneumonia. Though pneumonia was often fatal at that time, Carroll did not fear death; in fact, he once wrote in an 1896 letter to his sisters, “I sometimes think what a grand thing it will be to be able to say to oneself, ‘Death is over now; there is not that experience to be faced again.’”