“Creation sleeps! 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause;
An awful pause! prophetic of her end.”

Source: Ex Machina, Vol. 10: Term Limits

Source: Ulysses (1842), l. 22-32
Context: How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

This second version of Peggy Sanger's death quoted in Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, (2012), Jean H. Baker, Hill and Wang, New York, p. 103. https://www.google.com/#q=%22Peggy+was+sleeping.+Her+pulse+was+so+soft+and+slow%22&tbm=bks
Context: Peggy was sleeping. Her pulse was so soft and slow. I was unable to realize that the end was near and had my fingers on her ankle to get the pulse when before my eyes arose another Peggy horizontally sleeping [who] rose about a foot or more—fluttering and quivering a moment as if taking leave of its bondage and slowly and majestically [she] soared and floated across the bed and out through the iron closed door... Peggy had left for the great unknown and beyond.

Source: Hamlet

Variant: He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Article-Poems Aloud April 2009
Other

Evening Standard, Mon 31 Oct 2011, p16

Source: The Sense of an Ending