A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and tried to cheer me—
There's no one now to share my cup!
'Thackeray left us (the Philadelphians) in the winter of 1853, and in the summer of the year was on the Continent with his daughters. In the last chapter of the "Newcomes," published in 1855, he says: "Two years ago, walking with my children in some pleasant fields near to Berne, in Switzerland, I strayed from them into a little wood; and, coming out of it, presently told them how the story had been revealed to me somehow, which, for three-and-twenty months, the reader has been pleased to follow." It was on this Swiss tour that he wrote me a kindly characteristic letter. On the back of this note is a pen-and-ink caricature, of which he was not conscious when he began to write, as on turning his paper over he alludes to "the rubbishing picture which he didn't see." The sketch is very spirited, and is evidently the original of one of his illustrations to his grotesque fairy tale of the "Rose and the Ring," written (so he told a member of my family years afterwards) while he was watching and nursing his children, who were ill during this vacation ramble.'
The last journey chronicled by Thackeray was a merry little 'Roundabout' trip over the old Netherlands ground, in which he indulged, without preparation, when overworked and suffering from the anxieties of editing the 'Cornhill Magazine;' the journal is filled in with the zest of a stolen excursion, and the writer mentions that no one knew where he had gone; that there was only one chance of a letter finding him to curtail the freedom he had snatched, and he goes to the post, and there, sure enough, is that summons back to the 'thorny cushion,' which abruptly cuts short the last recorded holiday jaunt of Thackeray's life. In this last little jaunt through Holland, the impressions of the author were as fresh and full of pleasant observation as in those wayside sketches noted years before.
