But Russie's condition was a shadow over my life, growing deeper every day. Though he had been discharged from Boston as incurable, we put him under the care of one of the best of English surgeons, and one of the kindest-hearted men I have ever known, the late Mr. John Marshall, one of the warm and constant friends I had made through my relations with Rossetti, of whom Marshall was a strong admirer. Though his charges were modified to fit our estate, they aggregated, with all his moderation, to a sum which I could ill support; but to save, or even prolong Russie's life, I would have made any sacrifice. He was then not far from nine, and, though crippled by his disease, with his once beautiful face haggard with pain and no longer recognizable by those who had known him in his infancy, he was to me still the same,--a dear and loving child, the companion of my fortunes at their worst; and his devotion to me was the chief thing of his life. I had carried him in my arms at every change of vehicle in all the journeys from Athens to Boston and from Boston to London again, and to him I was all the world; to me he was like a nursling to its mother, the first thought of every day, an ever-present care, and his long struggle with death was an inseparable sadness in my existence. I remarked to Lowell one day that I feared he would die, and Lowell replied, "I should be afraid he would not die." The seeming cruelty of the expression struck me like a sentence of death, and momentarily chilled my feeling towards Lowell; but the incident made me understand some things in life as I could not have otherwise understood them, enabling me to take a larger view of our individual sorrows. There is no doubt that to Russie's sufferings and death I owe a large part of my experience of the spiritual life, and especially a comprehension of the secret of the mother's heart, so rarely understood by one of the other sex.