her during his holidays at his grandmother’s place. For, with all his delightful egoistic frankness in prattling about himself, _this_ was the one point too tender to be touched on, seriously or jocularly, ever to any one. It is of her, surely, that he is thinking in two of his four sonnets in the Coleridge collection, wherein he speaks of his “fancied wanderings with a fair-haired maid.” He placed the scene of “Rosamund Gray” in the cottage where lived Ann Simmons, near Widford, not far from Blakesware; and they show to sentimental strangers that portion of the cluster of cottages still left. They claim that it is her portrait which he drew for that of his heroine, even as he is the Allan Clare of the little story. He certainly hints, just for once, at this love scrape in that letter to Coleridge in which he speaks of his six weeks’ stay in the Hoxton Asylum: “It may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you that my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.” But his recovery from both derangements was radical and permanent, and he was able to say, only a little later: “I am pleased and satisfied with myself that this weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.” That wedding to the fortunes of his sister _was_ his life-long union, and haply saved him from any other, which would have harmed, rather than have helped, this man; and would have sacrificed deplorably _this_ vivid personality on the altar of the greatly-glorified god, the infestive Humdrum.
His serene good sense asserted its strength, at no time and in no way, so signally as in his absolute emancipation from this transient enslavement; and in his sedate statement of the fact--true in so many cases where the victim is too stupid to know it or too timorous to own it--that, “if it drew me out of some vices, it also prevented the growth of many virtues.”
As is usual, however, with the amatory infirmity, he suffered from that slight and superficial relapse, later in life, to which I have already referred. In his daily goings to and fro in Islington, he used to meet the lovely Quakeress, to whom he never spoke, and whom he adored silently and from afar. He only knew that she was named Hester, and it is her name which he has made immortal and her sweet memory which he has embalmed imperishably in his exquisite verses: