“Although I am a poet in a small way, I love my wife, and find my children perfect; they are moulded very much after their father’s image. We do not see much company, almost none, save one or two desperate duns, who thought so well of me as to come over here all the way from London to “look me up,” as they say. Their excuse for intruding on my privacy is that they frequently pass my way, and it suddenly occurs to them they have each a trifling bill for Mr. Bear. These scraps of paper are the tender links which bind me to the past, and recall the licence of poetic inspiration. Happy is he who dwells at home, and who has never drifted into doggerel!
“All I now require is to be left alone to the use of my natural instincts, which have ripened under affliction, and to the enjoyment { 316} of the attributes with which nature has endowed me. I have been long in discovering my true self. Now that I have found the rascal, I will keep watch over him, and prove to the world that my wandering life has not been wholly spent in pursuits of vanity.
“What more do I require? Does not the naïad of the rock distil from the elements an exhaustless store of water to quench my thirst? { 317} The beloved tree of Cybele, does it not shelter my dwelling with its evergreen boughs? Above all, when the day’s toil is ended and I return laden with the trophies of the chase, have I not a devoted partner to welcome me home?
“I have now no ambition save one, and that is to make the acquaintance of that heavenly constellation which bears our noble name.”
Dead as one perhaps dies when uncertain whether it is better to live or to die; dead without knowing when or how. I had indeed died painlessly, pleasantly, and mysteriously.
So easily had my life left my body, so little had it suffered in quitting the form of clay, that at first my body did not perceive the change.
Of the precise moment when from a living Turtle-dove I became a corpse, I remember nothing, unless it be that before death the moon shone brightly in a cloudless sky; and when my astonished spirit made out that it had fulfilled its duty on earth, the moon had not ceased to shine, and the sky was still cloudless. Probably my death, far from quenching the light of the moon, or sending the sky into mourning, had made no visible change in earth or heaven. What can it matter to fruitful nature whether a creature like me lives or dies? Yet after all, we are assured that a Sparrow shall not fall to the ground without its heavenly Father. { 319}