Poem debating the likelihood and nature of immortality, and the problems of suffering, good and evil, in response to the sudden death of RB’s friend *Smith on 14 September 1877. He was holidaying with her at La Saisiaz, a chalet in the Alps near Geneva. (The name is Savoyard dialect for ‘rock’—see Ohio 14.400–01—but RB probably thought, with Orr (1896), p. 188, that it meant ‘sun’.) The poem was written mainly in October and November 1877 and published in May 1878, with The Two Poets of Croisic, by Smith, Elder.