Mary's was a silent grief. But those few casual pathetic words written years afterwards speak her life-long sorrow,--"my dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart." She continued quiet in her lodgings, free from relapse till toward the end of the year.
On the 10th December Charles wrote in bad spirits,--"My teasing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things; too selfish for sympathy.... My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you. Continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this world is _not_ 'all barrenness.'"
But by Christmas Day she was once more in the asylum. In sad solitude he gave utterance, again in verse form, to his overflowing grief and love:--
I am a widow'd thing now thou art gone! Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend, Companion, sister, helpmate, counsellor! Alas! that honour'd mind whose sweet reproof And meekest wisdom in times past have smooth'd The unfilial harshness of my foolish speech, And made me loving to my parents old (Why is this so, ah God! why is this so?) That honour'd mind become a fearful blank, Her senses lock'd up, and herself kept out From human sight or converse, while so many Of the foolish sort are left to roam at large, Doing all acts of folly and sin and shame? Thy paths are mystery! Yet I will not think Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet and live In quietness and die so, fearing God. Or if _not_, and these false suggestions be A fit of the weak nature, loth to part With what it loved so long and held so dear; If thou art to be taken and I left (More sinning, yet unpunish'd save in thee,) It is the will of God, and we are clay In the potter's hand; and at the worst are made From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace, Till His most righteous purpose wrought in us, Our purified spirits find their perfect rest.
To add to these sorrows Coleridge had, for some time, been growing negligent as a correspondent. So early as April Lamb had written, after affectionate enquiries for Hartley "the minute philosopher" and Hartley's mother,--"Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are these matter-of-fact questions only. You are all very dear and precious to me. Do what you will, Coleridge, you may hurt and vex me by your silence but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world to whom I am more than indifferent and I can't afford to whistle them off to the winds."