"It has very much hurt me your telling me that you might be excused if you felt rather jealous at my expressing more sorrow for the departure of the friend who was with me, than of that one who was absent. It is quite impossible you can think I am more sorry for John's absence than I shall be for yours;—I shall therefore finish the subject."
[34] To this tomb he thus refers in the "Childish Recollections," as printed in his first unpublished volume:—
"Oft when, oppress'd with sad, foreboding gloom,
I sat reclined upon our favourite tomb."
[35] I find this circumstance, of his having occasionally slept at the Hut, though asserted by one of the old servants, much doubted by others.
[36] It may possibly have been the recollection of these pictures that suggested to him the following lines in the Siege of Corinth:—
"Like the figures on arras that gloomily glare,
Stirr'd by the breath of the wintry air,
So seen by the dying lamp's fitful light,
Lifeless, but life-like and awful to sight;
As they seem, through the dimness, about to come down
From the shadowy wall where their images frown."
[37] Among the unpublished verses of his in my possession, I find the following fragment, written not long after this period:—
"Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren,
Where my thoughtless childhood stray'd,
How the northern tempests, warring,
Howl above thy tufted shade!
"Now no more, the hours beguiling,
Former favourite haunts I see;
Now no more my Mary smiling,
Makes ye seem a heaven to me."
[38] The lady's husband, for some time, took her family name.