Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/271

Rh she was content to be the one left alone; and found a truth in Wordsworth's beautiful saying, that "a grave is a tranquillising object; resignation, in course of time, springs up from it as naturally as the wild flowers besprinkle the turf."

Lucid intervals continued, for a few years longer, to alternate with ever-lengthening periods of darkness. That mysterious brain was not even yet wholly wrecked by the eighty years of storms that had broken over it. Even when the mind seemed gone the heart kept some of its fine instincts. She learned to bear her solitude very patiently, and was gentle and kind always. Towards 1840 her friends persuaded her to remove to Alpha Road, St. John's Wood, that she might be nearer to them. Thirteen years she survived her brother, and ten was laid in the same grave with him at Edmonton, May 28th, 1847; a scanty remnant of the old friends gathering round,—"Martin Burney refusing to be comforted."

Coleridge looked upon Lamb "as one hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything." Or, as he himself once, with infinite sweetness, put it, "Poor Elia does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being. He stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful indeed for certain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift." Of Mary it may be said she hoped all things and feared nothing,—wisest, noblest attitude of the human soul towards the Unknown.