Emma Isola married Edward Moxon, and the Moxon home was the home of Mary Lamb whenever she wished to make it so, to the day of her death. The Moxons did good by stealth, and were glad they never awoke and found it fame.
"What shall I do when Mary leaves me, never to return?" once said Charles to Manning. But Mary lived for full twenty years after Charles had gone, and lived only in loving memory of him who had devoted his life to her. She seemed to exist just to talk of him and to garland the grave in the little old churchyard at Edmonton, where he sleeps. Wordsworth says, "A grave is a tranquillizing object: resignation in time springs up from it as naturally as wild flowers bespread the turf." Her work was to look after the "pensioners" and carry out the wishes of "my brother Charles."
But the pensioners were laid away to rest, one after the other, and the gentle Mary, grown old and feeble, became a pensioner, too, but thanks to that divine humanity that is found in English hearts, she never knew it. To the last, she looked after "the worthy poor," and carried flowers once a year to the grave of the gallant Captain Reynolds at Highgate, and never tired of sounding the praises of Charles and excusing the foibles of Coleridge. She lived only in the past, and its loving memories were more than a ballast 'gainst the ills of the present.
And so she went down into the valley and entered the great shadow, telling in cheerful, broken musings of a brother's love.
And then she was carried to the churchyard at Edmonton. There she rests in the grave with her brother. In life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided.