'Now, Agnes, Agnes list to me, Thy babes are longing so after thee.' 'I cannot come yet, here must I stay Until the priest shall have said his say,' And when the priest had said his say, She thought with her mother at home she'd stay. 'O Agnes, Agnes list to me, Thy babes are sorrowing after thee,' 'Let them sorrow and sorrow their fill, But back to them never return I will.'
We climbed on the graves, on the stones worn with rains, And we gazed up the aisles through the small leaded panes. She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear: 'Margaret, hist! come quick we are here! Dear heart,' I said, 'we are long-alone; The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan,' But, ah, she gave me never a look, For her eyes were sealed on the holy book! Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door. Come away, children, call no more! Come away, come down, call no more!
It says much for the literary proclivities of Norwich at this period that Borrow should have had so kindly a reception for his book as the subscription list implies. At the end of each of Wilkin's two hundred copies a 'list of subscribers' is given. It opens with the name of the Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Bathurst; it includes the equally familiar names of the Gurdons, Gurneys, Harveys, Rackhams, Hares (then as now of Stow Hall), Woodhouses--all good Norfolk or Norwich names that have come down to our time. Mayor Hawkes, who is made famous in _Lavengro_ by Haydon's portrait, is there also. Among London names we find 'F. Arden,' which recalls his friend 'Francis Ardry' in _Lavengro_, John Bowring, Borrow's new friend, and later to be counted an enemy, Thomas Campbell, Benjamin Haydon, and John Timbs, But the name that most strikes the eye is that of 'Thurtell.' Three of the family are among the subscribers, including Mr. George Thurtell of Eaton, near Norwich, brother of the murderer; there also is the name of John Thurtell, executed for murder exactly a year before. This would seem to imply that Borrow had been a long time collecting these names and subscriptions, and doubtless before the all-too-famous crime of the previous year he had made Thurtell promise to become a subscriber, and, let us hope, had secured his half-guinea. That may account, with so sensitive and impressionable a man as our author, for the kindly place that Weare's unhappy murderer always had in his memory. Borrow, in any case, was now, for a few years, to become more than ever a vagabond. Not a single further appeal did he make to an unsympathetic literary public for a period of five years at least.