Poetry she wrote with great ease and rapidity. In one of her letters to Mrs. Hall she says,--"I write poetry with far more ease than I do prose. In prose, I often stop and hesitate for a word; in poetry, never. Poetry always carries me out of myself. I forget everything in the world but the subject that has interested my imagination. It is the most subtile and insinuating of pleasures; but, like all pleasures, it is dearly bought. It is always succeeded by extreme depression of spirits, and an overpowering sense of bodily fatigue." And in one of her letters to me, she observes,--"Writing poetry is like writing one's own native language, and writing prose is like writing in a strange tongue." In fact, she could have improvised admirable verses without hesitation or difficulty. She married Mr. Maclean, then Governor of the Gold Coast[B],--a man who neither knew, felt, nor estimated her value. He wedded her, I am convinced, only because he was vain of her celebrity; and she married him only because he enabled her to change her name, and to remove from that society in which just then the old and infamous slander had been revived. There was in this case no love, no esteem, no respect,--and there could have been no discharge of duty that was not thankless and irksome. They were married a fortnight, at least, before the wedding was announced, even to friends. A sad story was some time afterwards circulated,--the truth of which I have no means of knowing,--that Mr. Maclean had been engaged to a lady in Scotland, which engagement he had withdrawn, and that she was in the act of sealing a letter to him when her dress caught fire, and she was burnt to death. The last time I saw L. E. L. was in Upper Berkeley Street, Connaught Square, on the 27th of June, 1838, soon after her marriage, when she was on the eve of her fatal voyage. A farewell party was given to some of her friends by Mrs. Sheddon, with whom she then boarded,--the Misses Lance having resigned their school. When the proper time arrived, there was a whisper round the table, and, as I was the oldest of her friends present, it fell to my lot to propose her health. I did so with the warmth I felt. The chances were that we should never meet again; and I considered myself free to speak of her in terms such as could not but have gratified any husband,--except the husband she had chosen,--and sought to convey to Maclean's mind the high _respect_, as well as affection, with which we all regarded her. The reader may imagine the chill that came over the party when Maclean rose to return thanks. He merely said, "If Mrs. Maclean has as many friends as Mr. Hall says she has, I only wonder they allowed her to leave them." One by one the guests rose and departed, with a brief and mournful farewell. Probably not one of them all ever saw her again.