At the spring vacation, Lucretia returned to her loved home; but the joy of her parents at once more embracing their darling daughter, was damped by observing that the fell destroyer had set its well-known mark upon her cheek. Her father called in another physician to consult with him, and, strange to say, it was decided that she should return to school in Albany, where she arrived May, 1825, and where her reception, her accommodations and prospects, seem to have given her much delight, and where she entered upon her career of study with her wonted ardor. But her physical strength could not sustain the demands upon it. She thus writes to her mother: "I am very wretched: am I never to hear from you again? I am homesick. I know I am foolish, but I cannot help it. To tell the truth, I am half sick, I am so weak, so languid. I cannot eat. I am nervous; I know I am. I weep most of the time. I have blotted the paper so that I cannot write. I cannot study much longer if I do not hear from you." Her disease appears now to have assumed a fixed character, and in her next letter, she expresses a fear that it is beyond the reach of human art. Her mother, herself ill, set off at once for Albany, and was received by her child with rapture. "O mamma, I thought I should never have seen you again! But, now I have you here, I can lay my aching head upon your bosom. I shall soon be better." The journey homeward, though made in the heats of July, was attended with less suffering than was anticipated. "Her joy," says her mother, "upon finding herself at home, operated for a time like magic." The progress of disease seemed to be suspended. Those around her received new hope; but she herself was not deceived, and she calmly waited for that great change which for her possessed no terrors, for her hopes as to the future rested upon a sure foundation. But one fear disturbed her, to which she refers in the following, the last piece she ever composed, and which is left unfinished:-- "There is a something which I dread; It is a dark and fearful thing; It steals along with withering tread, Or sweeps on wild destruction's wing. That thought comes o'er me in the hour Of grief, of sickness, or of sadness; 'Tis not the dread of death; 'tis more,-- It is the dread of madness. O, may these throbbing pulses pause, Forgetful of their feverish course; May this hot brain, which, burning, glows With all a fiery whirlpool's force,-- Be cold, and motionless, and still, A tenant of its lowly bed; But let not dark delirium steal----"