“You will not be surprised to learn that I have lost my mother. Early on Tuesday morning there came on that difficulty of breathing which betokened death: till then all had been easy; for the most part she had slept, and, when waking, underwent no pain but that wretched sense of utter weakness; but then there was the struggle and sound in the throat, and the deadly appearance of the eyes, that had lost all their tranquillity. She asked for laudanum; I dropt some, but with so unsteady a hand, that I knew not how much; she saw the colour of the water,’ and cried, with a stronger voice than I had heard during her illness, ‘That’s nothing, Robert! thirty drops—six and thirty!’
“It relieved her. She would not suffer me to
* Jan. 6. 1802. |
| 180 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“We had been suffering for twelve hours, and the moment of her release was welcome: like one whose limb has just been amputated, he feels the immediate ceasing of acute suffering;—the pain of the wound soon begins, and the sense of the loss continues through life. I calmed and curbed myself, and forced myself to employment; but, at night, there was no sound of feet in her bedroom, to which I had been used to listen, and in the morning it was not my first business to see her. I had used to carry her her food, for I could persuade her better than any one else to the effort of swallowing it.
“Thank God, it is all over! Elmsley called on me and offered me money if I needed it; it was a kindness that I shall remember. Corry had paid me a second quarter, however.
“I have now lost all the friends of my infancy and
childhood. The whole recollections of my first ten years are connected with the
dead. There lives no one who can share them with me. It is losing so much of
one’s existence. I have not been yielding to, or rather indulging, grief;
that would have been
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 181 |
“When I saw her after death, Wynn, the whole appearance was so much that of utter death, that the first feeling was as if there could have been no world for the dead; the feeling was very strong, and it required thought and reasoning to recover my former certainty, that as surely we must live hereafter, as all here is not the creation of folly or of chance.
