Thus glided away, in peace, domestic joys, improvement, and prosperity, this first—and last! happy year of the new London residence. In the course of the second, a cough, with alarming symptoms, menaced the breast of the life and soul of the little circle; consisting now of six children, clinging with equal affection around each parent chief.
She rapidly grew weaker and worse. Her tender husband hastened her to Bristol Hotwells, whither he followed her upon his first possible vacation; and where, in a short time, he had the extasy to believe that he saw her recover, and to bring her back to her fond little family.
But though hope was brightened, expectation was deceived! stability of strength was restored no more; and, in the ensuing autumn, she was seized with an inflammatory disorder with which her delicate and shaken frame had not force to combat. No means were left unessayed to stop the progress of danger; but all were fruitless! and, after less than a week of pain the most terrific, the deadly ease of mortification suddenly, awfully succeeded to the most excruciating torture.
Twelve stated hours of morbid bodily repose became, from that tremendous moment of baleful relief, the counted boundary of her earthly existence.
The wretchedness of her idolizing husband at the development of such a predestined termination to her sufferings, when pronounced by the celebrated Dr. Hunter, was only not distraction. But she herself, though completely aware that her hours now were told, met the irrevocable doom with open, religious, and even cheerful composure—sustained, no doubt, by the blessed aspirations of mediatory salvation; and calmly declaring that she quitted the world with perfect tranquillity, save for leaving her tender husband and helpless children. And, in the arms of that nearly frantic husband, who, till that fatal epoch, had literally believed her existence and his own, in this mortal journey, to be indispensably one—she expired.
When the fatal scene was finally closed, the disconsolate survivor immured himself almost from light and life, through inability to speak or act, or yet to bear witnesses to his misery.
He was soon, however, direfully called from this concentrated anguish, by the last awful summons to the last awful rites to human memory, the funeral; which he attended in a frame of mind that nothing, probably, could have rescued from unrestrained despair, save a pious invocation to submission that had been ejaculated by his Esther, when she perceived his rising agony, in an impressive “Oh, Charles!”—almost at the very moment she was expiring: an appeal that could not but still vibrate in his penetrated ears, and control his tragic passions.
The character, and its rare, resplendent worth, of this inestimable person, is best committed to the pen of him to whom it best was known; as will appear by the subsequent letter, copied from his own hand-writing. It was found amongst his posthumous papers, so ill-written and so blotted by his tears, that he must have felt himself obliged to re-write it for the post.
It may be proper to again mention, that though Esther was maternally of French extraction, and though her revered mother was a Roman Catholic, she herself was a confirmed Protestant. But that angelic mother had brought her up with a love and a practice of genuine piety which undeviatingly intermingled in every action, and, probably, in every thought of her virtuous life, so religiously, so deeply, that neither pain nor calamity could make her impatient of existence; nor yet could felicity the most perfect make her reluctant to die.
To paint the despairing grief produced by this deadly blow must be cast, like the portrait of its object, upon the sufferer; and the inartificial pathos, the ingenuous humility, with which both are marked in the affecting detail of her death, written in answer to a letter of sympathizing condolence from the tenderest friend of the deceased, Miss Dorothy Young, so strongly speak a language of virtue as well as of sorrow, that, unconsciously, they exhibit his own fair unsophisticated character in delineating that of his lost love. A more touching description of happiness in conjugal life, or of wretchedness in its dissolution, is rarely, perhaps, with equal simplicity of truth, to be found upon record.