of Mr. Quillinan's verses. His lines, beginning "Madness, if thou will let me dwell with thee," exhale the hot fierce breath of despair itself! Society at Berne moved him to exclaim—
It is a melancholy art
To take the theme the gay impart
With a complacent smile:
They little think the secret heart
Is aching all the while.
The sight of her favourite field-flowers, or of a "soft blue eye," wrang from him a wail that faintly echoes that of him who dwelt alone upon Helvellyn's side, and made his moan for the pretty Barbara. Wherever the bereaved man wandered, there uprose some symbol to associate his thoughts with the quiet churchyard of Grasmere—some torturing memory to deepen the affliction of those
Who, with a vain compunction, burn
To expiate faults that grieved
A breast they never more can pain,
A heart they cannot please again—
The living, the bereaved.
O vain complaint of selfishness!
Weak wish to paralyse distress!
The tear, the pang, the groan,
Are justly mine, who once possess'd,
Yet sometimes pain'd, the fondest breast
Where love was ever known.
Returning to England, he resided either with his late wife s relatives in Kent, or at his own house in town—with occasional visits to the Wordsworths and other friends. Twice he subsequently visited Portugal. In 1841, "the long attachment between him and Dora Wordsworth, which first sprang out of the root of grief, was crowned by their marriage." They passed two happy summers at "The Island" in Windermere (lent them by their friend Mr. Curwen, more suo—whence Wordsworth's name for the place, Borrow-me-an Island), enjoying the company of Professor Wilson[1] and other choice spirits. With the next year came anxieties about Mrs. Quillinan's health, and, a voyage to the south of Europe being recommended, they both undertook a tour in Spain and Portugal—an account of which the invalid lady published in 1846.[2] The ensuing summer was her last. "It would be an improper disclosure of domestic privacy," Mr. Johnston observes, "to quote the letters written by her husband during that time of misery: let it suffice to say that nowhere, either in works of fiction or records of actual life, has the writer of this memoir ever seen letters more distinctly marked by manly sense, combined with almost feminine tenderness." The "Suspiria,"
- ↑ With whom Mr. Quillinan's friendship began, we believe, in a literary feud, tending in rise and progress to the same character as that of Moore and Jeffrey.
- ↑ In Tait's Magazine for that year, Mr. Quillinan published a minute description of "The Foz," or marine suburb of Oporto, under the title of "The Belle"—of the incidents in which sketch "there are probably few," he says, "which are not true," though characters and events are intermingled and transposed, to avoid offensive personality. It "is neither a novel nor a romance, and he thought it proper to add, "least of all a satire."
