£6000 to £7000 a-year. His assiduity towards his afflicted wife had prevented him from taking his accustomed recreation, and he embraced the occasion of this compulsory absence, to make, in company with his son, a rapid trip to the West of England. He visited, with childish curiosity, all his old haunts; the house in which he was born, the schools to which he had been sent, the church, Miss Tyler's house: Martin Hall, his former abode at Westbury, he was unable to recognise. During these researches, his friend Walter Savage Landor was an unfailing companion.
On the 16th November, 1837, his wife died. For some time previously she had been daily sinking, and the last glimmer of consciousness seemed to be the assurance that she was tended by those who best loved her. During the three years she had laboured under her affliction, the anxieties of Southey had been relieved by the exertions they occasioned. The performance of those duties which, as a husband, he conceived it would have been selfish and unworthy to relegate to others, had diverted his mind from brooding over his increasing calamities. But when the solemn blank in his home and heart, caused by the bereavement, first presented itself broadly to his feelings, his spirit sank within him, and he felt in truth that "the life of his life" had departed. His accustomed occupations afforded not the relief one would have expected they would have done from his habits and manners. The bride of his youth, the companion of his manhood; she had shared all his joys, had alleviated all his sorrows. With her, happen what might, there was hope; without her, what worth hoping for? It was too late now to begin the journey of life afresh—there was no inspiration in the future, and the past was a vanished dream. But what had already transpired was but as the rehearsal of another and similar tragedy. Mental anxiety had unhinged the faculties
