Clare became patriarchal in appearance; and his powers failed more rapidly, until he could walk no longer. A wheel-chair was procured for him, that he might still enjoy the garden and the open air. On Good Friday in 1864 he was taken out for the last time; afterwards he could not be moved, yet he would still manage to reach his window-seat; then came paralysis, and on the afternoon of May the 20th, 1864,
His soul seemed with the free, He died so quietly.
His last years had been spent in some degree of happiness, and from officials and fellow-patients he had received gentleness, and sympathy, and even homage. It has been said, not once nor twice but many times, that in the asylum he was never visited by his wife, nor by any of his children except the youngest son, Charles, who came once. That any one should condemn Patty for her absence is surely presumptuous in the extreme: she was now keeping her home together with the greatest difficulty, nor can it be known what deeper motives influenced relationships between wife and husband, even if the name of Mary Joyce meant nothing. That the children came to see their father whenever they could, the letters given above signify: but, if the opportunities were not many, there were the strongest of reasons. Frederick died in 1843, just after Clare's incarceration: Anna in the year following: Charles the youngest, a boy of great promise, in 1852: and Sophia in 1863. William, and John who went to Wales, went when occasion came and when they could afford the expense of the journey: Eliza, who survived last of Clare's children and who most of all understood him and his poetry, was unable through illness to leave her home for many years, yet she went once to see him. The isolation which found its expression in "I Am" was another matter: it was the sense of futility, of not having fulfilled his mission, of total eclipse that spoke there. N. P. Willis, perhaps the Howitts, and a few more worthies came for brief hours to see Clare, rather as a phenomenon than as a poet; but Clare, who had sat with Elia and his assembled host, who had held his own with the finest brains of his time and had written such a cornucopia of genuine poetry now lying useless in his cottage at Northborough, cannot but have regarded the Northampton Asylum as "the shipwreck of his own esteems."