This cruel scene was her death warrant.[120] Hitherto she had venerated Swift; and in the midst of her sufferings, confided in him, idolized him as the first of human beings. What must he now have appeared in her eyes?--They say, "Hell has no fury like a woman scorned;"--it is not so: the recoil of the heart, when forced to abhor and contemn, where it has once loved, is far,--far worse; and Vanessa, who had endured her lover's scorn, could not scorn _him_, and live. She was seized with a delirious fever, and died "in resentment and in despair."[121] She desired, in her last will, that the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, which she considered as a monument of Swift's love for her, should be published, with some of his letters, which would have explained what was left obscure, and have cleared her fame. The poem was published; but the letters, by the interference of Swift's friends, were, at the time, suppressed. On her death, and Stella's flight, Swift absented himself from home for two months, nor did any one know whither he was gone. During that time, what must have been his feelings--_if_ he felt at all? what agonies of remorse, grief, shame, and horror, must have wrung his bosom! he had, in effect, murdered the woman who loved him, as absolutely as if he had plunged a poniard into her heart: and yet it is not clear that Swift was a prey to any such feelings; at least his subsequent conduct gave no assurance of it. On his return to Dublin, mutual friends interfered to reconcile him with Stella. About this time, she happened to meet, at a dinner-party, a gentleman who was a stranger to the real circumstances of her situation, and who began to speak of the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, then just published. He observed, that Vanessa must have been an admirable creature to have inspired the Dean to write so finely. "That does not follow," replied Mrs. Johnson, with bitterness; "it is well known that the Dean could write finely on a _broomstick_." Ah! how must jealousy and irritation, and long habits of intimacy with Swift, have poisoned the mind and temper of this unhappy woman, before she could have uttered this cruel sarcasm!--And yet she was true to the softness of her sex; for after the lapse of several months, during which it required all the attention of Mr. Ford and his family to sustain and console her, she consented to return to Dublin, and live with the Dean on the same terms as before. Well does old Chaucer say, There can no man in humblesse him acquite As woman can, he can be half so true As woman be! "Swift welcomed her to town," says Sheridan, "with that beautiful poem entitled 'Stella at Wood Park;'" that is to say, he welcomed back to the home from which he had driven her, the woman whose heart he had well nigh broken, the wife he had every way injured and abused,--with a tissue of coarse sarcasms, on the taste for magnificence she must have acquired in her visit to Wood Park, and the difficulty of descending