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162 forbade such visits for several days at a time. It was after one of these intervals that Ticknor saw her. She received him in bed, and her weakness was already so great that she could hardly stretch out her hand to touch his. She alluded to her approaching end with a calmness infinitely pathetic and admirable in one who suffered none of that slow extinction of the faculties which blunts the anguish of the end for so many departing souls. Seeing that her words pained her daughter, she changed the subject to America, and spoke of the great future of that country with characteristic enthusiasm of belief. Of Europe, Ticknor said, "she despaired." She might well do so, for the era then beginning was one with which she could not have sympathised. Whatever its virtues, its force, its promise, the oracles by which it was inspired must have sounded strange in her ears. Herself, she had been a kind of priestess; through her some unknown God had spoken, and amid the thunder of great events her faith, for all its ideal grandeur, had hardly seemed too mighty. But that age had passed, and it was fit she should pass with it.

All witnesses except the captious Sismondi bear testimony to the devotion with which Rocca nursed his wife in her last illness. Silent, pallid, sad as a phantom itself, he sat day by day beside her bed. According to Madame d'Abrantes, she never looked long at him without feeling that she might still live. The sense that her existence was necessary to him seemed to inspire her for a moment with the courage to take up anew the increasing burden of her days. But at other times her thoughts turned with a grateful sense of coming rest to the great change, and to the thought of her father "waiting for her," as she said,