This leaves only Southey and the Wordsworths; and their ending was not far off.  The old poet had seen almost too much of these endings.  One day, when I found a stoppage in the road at the foot of Rydal Mount, from a sale of furniture, such as is common in this neighborhood every spring and autumn, I met Mr. Wordsworth,—­not looking observant and amused, but in his blackest mood of melancholy, and evidently wanting to get out of the way.  He said he did not like the sight:  he had seen so many of these sales; he had seen Southey’s, not long before; and these things reminded him how soon there must be a sale at Rydal Mount.  It was remarked by a third person that this was rather a wilful way of being miserable; but I never saw a stronger love of life than there was in them all, even so late in their day as this.  Mrs. Wordsworth, then past her three-score years and ten, observed to me that the worst of living here was that it made one so unwilling to go.  It seems but lately that she said so; yet she nursed to their graves her daughter and her husband and his sister, and she herself became blind; so that it was not hard “to go,” when the time came.

Southey’s decline was painful to witness,—­even as his beloved wife’s had been to himself.  He never got over her loss; and his mind was decidedly shaken before he made the second marriage which has been so much talked over.  One most touching scene there was when he had become unconscious of all that was said and done around him.  Mrs. Southey had been careless of her own interests about money when she married him, and had sought no protection for her own property.  When there was manifestly no hope of her husband’s mind ever recovering, his brother assembled the family and other witnesses, and showed them a kind of will which he had drawn up, by which Mrs. Southey’s property was returned to herself, intact.  He said they were all aware that their relative could not, in his condition, make a will, and that he was even unaware of what they were doing; but that it was right that they should, pledge themselves by some overt act to fulfil what would certainly have been his wish.  The bowed head could not be raised, but the nerveless hand was guided to sign the instrument; and all present agreed to respect it as if it were a veritable will,—­as of course they did.  The decline was full of painful circumstances; and it must have been with a heart full of sorrow that Wordsworth walked over the hills to attend the funeral.

The next funeral was that of his own daughter Dora,—­Mrs. Quillinan.  A story has got about, as untrue as it is disagreeable, that Dora lost her health from her father’s opposition to her marriage, and that Wordsworth’s excessive grief after her death was owing to remorse.  I can myself testify to her health having been very good for a considerable interval between that difficulty and her last illness; and this is enough, of itself, to dispose of the story.  Her parents considered the marriage an imprudent one;