“The ideas,” he says, “which I had collected at pleasure, and which I reckoned peculiarly my own, were dropping away one after another. Fancy was returning from her flight—memory giving up her trust; what was vigorous becoming weak, and what was cheerful and active, dull and indolent.” And yet he was at this time on the brink of writing an immortal poem! One December night, sitting alone in his lodgings in great desolation of mind, he, to turn his thoughts from himself, took up the first book within reach, which happened to be Hartley’s “Oratory.” He opened on Lord Byron’s “Darkness,” and had not read far when he thought he could write something to the purpose on the subject of the general resurrection. After revolving his ideas a little, he struck off about a thousand lines—the now well-known passage, beginning,— “In ’customed glory bright!” Soon afterwards he wrote to his brother, that “he had lately been soaring in the pure ether of eternity, and linking his thoughts to the Everlasting Throne!” “And I knew,” says his brother, “that he had now found a subject to write on.” “May the eternal and infinite Spirit,” wrote this sympathizing brother in return, “inform your soul with an immortal argument, and enable you to conduct it to your own happiness in time, and blessedness in eternity; and to His praise, honour, and glory for ever!” Soon after this, Robert returned to his father’s humble dwelling, at Moorhouse, where he continued his poem, but without any definite plan. “One night, sitting alone in an old room, and letting his mind wander backward and forward over things at large, in a moment, as if by an immediate inspiration, the idea of the poem struck him; and the plan of it, as it now stands, stretched out before him, so that at one glance he saw through it from end to end like an avenue. He never felt, he said, as he did then; and he shook from head to foot.” * * * * * How soon September has come! The roses are now nearly all over; but the ram’s-head border I had cut in the grass-plat last spring is gay with fuchsias, verbenas, geraniums, and balsams. Miss Burt, who has no garden of her own, comes now and then to expend, as she says, some of her superfluous energies, in raking and hoeing my garden, while I sit near her in a light wicker chair, and watch her proceedings. She became tired of her cockatoo about a month after her return, and made a present of it to Mrs. Grove. The cockatoo thus shared the fate of a certain fine cucumber, which I remember being passed from house to house one autumn, till at length somebody was found who liked it.