he had loved. It was a bitter trial to him, and he solaced himself in his own way by pouring out his heart in the verses—
"I've left my own old Home of Homes,
Green fields, and every pleasant place;"
concluding with the lines so conscious of daily increasing sadness, so hopeless of the present and the future—
"I dwell on trifles, like a child—
I feel as ill becomes a man;
And yet my thoughts, like weedlings wild.
Grow up and blossom where they can:
They turn to places known so long,
And feel that joys were dwelling there;
So home-fed pleasure fills my song
That hath no present joy to share."
And now, though he had a house to live in, concerning the rent of which he need be under no anxiety, and a pension of £45 a year, yet with a wife and children, and laden with debt, he could not keep his head above water. Poverty came on like an armed man, and what rendered it worse to bear than before was that the friends who had surrounded him from a child could not know. So he sank deeper and deeper into distress of mind and body. One day in the winter following he went out, having left his children almost starving. The time passed on, and he did not return. His little girl was sent to look for him. She found him lying insensible by the river-side. They dragged him home, got him to bed, and there he lay a poor invalid until the spring-time came again. Then he sat up once more in his chair and looked at his books. His wife would have him go out. She had known of old—
"How forth into the fields he went,
And nature's living motion lent
The pulse of life to discontent."
But Nature-medicine would do no longer; he was conscious of it, and refused to go. It was not merely physical disease, it was not entirely mental; it was something deeper still,—his spirit was wounded. He had tasted the bitter cup the world had to give, and he found it wormwood and gall. The beautiful unknown land had
