Dear Mary—
See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train—
Vapours, and clouds, and storms.
I am shivering over a little fire at the bottom of my grate, and have small inclination to tempt the sea-breezes and the waves; we must therefore defer our meeting till it comes within the walls of London.
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Au revoir! To what am I reserved? I know not.
The wide (no not) the unbounded prospect lies before me,
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.
A new shadow was now to fall upon the poor old man, in the death from cholera of his only son, Mary’s half-brother, William. This son in his early youth had given some trouble and caused some anxiety, but his character, as he grew up, had become steadier and more settled. He was happily married, and seemed likely to be a source of real comfort and satisfaction to his parents in their old age. By profession he was a reporter, but he had his hereditary share of literary ability and of talent “turned for the relation of fictitious adventures,” and left in MS. a novel called Transfusion, published by his father after his death, with the motto—
Some noble spirits, judging by themselves,
May yet conjecture what I might have been.
Although inevitably somewhat hardened against misfortune of the heart by his self-centred habits of mind and anxiety about money, Godwin was much saddened by this loss, and to Mrs. Godwin it was a very great and bitter grief indeed.
Clare saw at once in this the beginning of fresh troubles; the realisation of all the gloomy forebodings in which she had indulged. She wrote to Jane Hogg—