“. . . . . Since my last letter we have had a severe
shock in the death of Miss Hutchinson,
Mrs. Wordsworth’s sister, who
was one of the dearest friends these poor girls had, and who was indeed to me
like a sister. She had been with us in all our greatest afflictions. Her
strength had been so much exhausted in nursing Miss
Wordsworth, the elder, and with anxiety for Dora, that after a rheumatic fever, from which
she seemed to be recovered, she sunk at once, owing to mere weakness: an
effusion on the brain was the immediate cause. Miss
Wordsworth, whose death has been looked upon as likely any day
for the last two years, still lives on. Her mind, at times, fails
| 272 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 60. |
“Our health, thank God, continues good. . . . . If I could leave home with satisfaction, I should go either to Harrogate or Shap (if Shap, which I hope, would do,) for the sake of the waters. But my poor Edith likes none of us to leave her, and requests us not to do so. This, of course, would induce me to bear with any thing that can be borne whitout danger. Nor, indeed, should I willingly leave my daughters, who stand in need of all that can be done to cheer them in the performance of their duty, and who are the better because they exert themselves to keep up their own spirits for my sake.
“You will see how unprofitable it would be for me, under these circumstances, to look beyond the present anywhere—except to another world. In the common course of nature, it cannot be long before all the events of this life will be of no further importance to me, than as they shall have prepared me for a better. To look back over the nine-and-thirty years which have elapsed since you and I first met at Lisbon, seems but as yesterday. Wednesday, the 12th, completes my sixty-first year; and the likelihood is, that before a fourth part of the like interval has passed, you and I shall meet—where there will be no more sorrow nor parting.
“God bless you, my dear old friend, and bring us
| Ætat. 60. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 273 |
