On the 10th of January, 1616, Judith impulsively married Thomas Quincy, without the publication of the church banns, to the scandal of the community, but love cared naught for rules or creeds when Nature stood as monitor.
Seated one April morning in his private apartment, looking over his beautiful garden of vegetables, fruit, flowers, vines and waving elms, margined by the murmuring waters of the silver Avon, I asked him if he had any special message before leaving life to communicate to the ages.
"Yes, my dear Jack, you, by nature's law must, like the Wandering Jew, fulfill your destiny, and 'tramp' out your thousand years ere you join me on the 'Island of Immortality.' These precepts I enjoin:
The Love and Truth that in my plays abide
Shall teach the lesson of equal justice;
Nothing that's wrong can prosper on this earth,
And though your crime-secret be hid in mounts
Of adamant, kissing, loftiest sky,
The worm of detection and exposure
Shall gnaw its way through rugged, granite ribs
And blow your foul wickedness around the world.
Men, states and empires, rise and flash like bubbles
On the rolling ocean of existence,
And then like the false, shimmering vision
Of a dream, pass into nameless oblivion.
The hours, days, years and ages, lost and gone
Are only a moment from the ticking clock
Of eternity. And all future time,
Incalculable as drops of ocean
Or leaves of grass, come and go incessant,
Like the balmy airs; or whistling winds
That blow o'er tropic or arctic lands.
I know and feel that myriad spirits
People the vast, circumambient air,—
And as my soul within knocks at heart and lips
For exit from this crumbling house of corruption,
Methinks I see and hear a chorus of
Angel spirits beckoning my tired soul
Onward and upward to omnipotence.
Every blade of grass and flower beautiful;
Every star that twinkles in the moonlit sky;
Every white-crested billow of the sea;
Every child that dreams, laughs and sings in glee;
Every thought, pinioned with eternal Hope—
Guarantees assurance of Immortality!"
On the 13th of April, 1616, ten days before the death of Shakspere, Burbage, Jonson, Drayton, Florio, Field, Condell, Heming and Jo Taylor came down from London by special invitation to enjoy the hospitality of the Bard.
Judith made every preparation for their social entertainment, and the "New Place" was ablaze with hospitality and dramatic glory for a week.
I shall not enter into the pleasant and eccentric details of these authors and actors, but leave it to the imagination of the intelligent reader to know what a crowd of brilliant bohemians might do in the evening of life talking, laughing and drinking to the memory of friends and days that are no more!
Three days before the death of the great luminary of dramatic and poetic letters, he called me into his bedroom. He was resting in a reclining chair by an oaken desk, looking out on his garden, while the birds of spring were chirping, singing and courting among the blooming bushes and trees of his beautiful home.
Addressing me in the old familiar way, he said: "Jack, my throat and head give me great pain. I long to rest beneath the walls of Old Trinity Church, never again to gaze upon its glinting spire through sunrise or sunset beams.