Whence then this strange increase of joy? He, only he can tell, who matched like me, (If such another happy man there be,) Has by his own experience tried How much the _wife_ is dearer than the _bride_! Six months afterwards, his Lucy was seized with the illness of which she died in her twenty-ninth year, leaving three infants, the eldest not four years old.[67] As there are people who strangely unite, as inseparable, the ideas of fiction and rhyme, and doubt the sincerity of her husband's grief, because he wrote a monody on her memory, he shall speak for himself in prose. The following is an extract from his letter to his father, written two days before her death. "I believe God supports me above my own strength, for the sake of my friends who are concerned for me, and in return for the resignation with which I endeavour to submit to his will. If it please Him, in his infinite mercy, to restore my dear wife to me, I shall most thankfully acknowledge his goodness; if not, I shall most humbly endure his chastisement, which I have too much deserved. These are the sentiments with which my mind is replete; but as it is still a most bitter cup, how my body will bear it, if it must not pass from me, it is impossible for me to foretell; but I hope the best.--Jan. 17th, 1747." * * * * * I imagine Dr. Johnson meant a sneer at Lord Lyttelton, when he says laconically,--"his wife died, and he _solaced_ himself by writing a long monody on her memory."--In these days we might naturally exclaim against a widowed husband who should _solace_ himself by apostrophes to the Muses and Graces, and bring in the whole Aonian choir,--Pindus and Castalia, Aganippe's fount, and Thespian vales; the Clitumnus and the Illissus, and such Pagan and classical embroidery.--What should we have thought of Lord Byron's famous "Fare thee well," if conceived in this style?--but such was the poetical vocabulary of Lord Lyttelton's day: and that he had not sufficient genius and originality to rise above it, is no argument against the sincerity of his grief. Petrarch and his Laura (_apropos_ to all that has ever been sung or said of love for five hundred years) are called, in a very common-place strain, from their "Elysian bowers;" and then follow some lines of real and touching beauty, because they owe nothing to art or effort, but are the immediate result of truth and feeling. He is still apostrophising Petrarch.