Thomas Barlow on his return to America sometimes favored his friends with vivid pictures of the sufferings and privations endured by the travellers in their flight from Wilna. The passage of so many men had rendered the roads well-nigh impassable; food, even of the meanest kind, could only be procured with the greatest difficulty; and often the travellers were mixed up with the flying masses, as it seemed inextricably. Ruined habitations, wagons and provision-vans overturned and pillaged, men dying by scores from hunger and starvation, and frozen corpses of men and horses, were objects that constantly presented themselves. At length they crossed the Niemen and pursued their journey through Poland, still suffering terribly from the cold and from the insufficient nature of the food obtainable; but on reaching Zarrow,[C] an obscure village near Cracow, the poet was seized with a sudden and fatal attack of pneumonia, the result, no doubt, of privation and exposure. He was borne to a little Jewish cottage, the only inn that the village afforded, and there died December 26, 1812. His remains were interred in the little churchyard of the village where he died. It is rarely that an American visits his grave, and the government has never taken interest enough in its minister to erect a memorial slab above his dust; but wifely devotion has supplied the omission, and a plain monument of marble, on which are inscribed his name, age and station and the circumstances of his death, marks the poet's place of sepulture. The news of his death seems not to have reached the United States until the succeeding March. The Federal journals merely announced the fact without comment: the Republican papers published formal eulogiums on the dead statesman. President Madison, in his inaugural of 1813, thus referred to the event: "The sudden death of the distinguished citizen who represented the United States in France, without any special arrangement by him for such a conclusion, has kept us without the expected sequel to his last communications; nor has the French government taken any measures for bringing the depending negotiations to a conclusion through its representative in the United States." In France the poet's demise excited a more general feeling of regret, perhaps, than in his own country. A formal eulogy on his life and character was pronounced by Dupont de Nemours before the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, and the year succeeding his death an account of his life and writings was published at Paris in quarto form, accompanied by one canto of _The Columbiad_, translated into French heroic verse. The American residents of Paris also addressed a letter of condolence to Mrs. Barlow, in which is apparent the general sentiment of respect and affection entertained for the poet in the French capital.