recognize literary and scientific eminence as a national claim; the act was done upon public grounds, and Southey had the happiness of knowing that others beside himself would partake of the benefit. “Our domestic prospects are darkening upon us daily,” Southey wrote in July, 1835. “I know not whether the past or the present seems most like a dream to me, so great and strange is the difference. But yet a little while, and all will again be at the best.” While Mrs. Southey lived, a daily demand was made upon his sympathies and solicitude which it was his happiness to fulfil. But from all except his wife he seemed already to be dropping away into a state of passive abstraction. Kate and Bertha silently ministered to his wants, laid the books he wanted in his way, replenished his ink-bottle, mended his pens, stirred the fire, and said nothing. A visit to the south-west of England in company with his son broke the long monotony of endurance. It was a happiness to meet Landor at Bristol, and Mrs. Bray at Tavistock, and Mrs. Bray’s friend, the humble poet, Mary Colling, whose verses he had reviewed in the _Quarterly_. Yet to return to his sorrowful home was best of all; there is a leap up of the old spirits in a letter to his daughters announcing his approach. It is almost the last gleam of brightness. In the autumn of that year (1835) Edith Southey wasted away, growing weaker and weaker. The strong arm on which she had leaned for two-and-forty years, supported her down stairs each day and bore her up again at evening. When the morning of November 16th broke, she passed quietly “from death unto life.”