Page:The letters of William Blake (1906).djvu/106

 48 After the death of her husband she resided for some time with the author of this, whose domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken by her, until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office of sincere affection and regard. She then returned to the lodging in which she had lived previously to this act of maternal loveliness, in which she continued until she was decayed by fretting and devoured with the silent worm of grief, which, not from any distrust of the providence of her heavenly protector, but from that pathetic clinging to the stem of her existence, wasted her, and she withered only from holding fast to those dead branches which were her former life and shadow. Ever since his death her stomach had proved restless and painful, and on the morning of the 17th of October last she was attacked with cramp and spasms, and after having exhibited great patience and endured great pain for twenty-four hours, on the following morning, at half-past seven o'clock, being the 18th of October 1831, she yielded up the ghost, having survived her husband only four years. Her age not being known but by calculation, sixty-five years were placed upon her coffin.

She was buried, according to her own directions, at Bunhill Fields, with the same funeral