I am as alert at thinking and deciding as I ever was in my life.  Yet, when I contrast what this place now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will break.  Lonely, aged, deprived of my family—­all but poor Anne, an impoverished and embarrassed man, I am deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them alone.  Even her foibles were of service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections.

I have seen her.  The figure I beheld is, and is not, my Charlotte—­my thirty years’ companion.  There is the same symmetry of form, though those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic—­but that yellow masque, with pinched features, which seems to mock life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression?  I will not look on it again.  Anne thinks her little changed, because the latest idea she had formed of her mother is as she appeared under circumstances of sickness and pain.  Mine go back to a period of comparative health.  If I write long in this way, I shall write down my resolution, which I should rather write up, if I could.  I wonder how I shall do with the large portion of thoughts which were hers for thirty years.  I suspect they will be hers yet for a long time at least.  But I will not blaze cambric and crape in the public eye like a disconsolate widower, that most affected of all characters.

May 17.—–­ Last night Anne, after conversing with apparent ease, dropped suddenly down as she rose from the supper-table, and lay six or seven minutes as if dead.  Clarkson, however, has no fear of these affections.

May 18.—­Another day, and a bright one to the external world, again opens on us; the air soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves glittering.  They cannot refresh her to whom mild weather was a natural enjoyment.  Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon.  But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime.  No, no.  She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere—­somehow; where we cannot tell; how we cannot tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me.  The necessity of this separation,—­that necessity which rendered it even a relief,—­that and patience must be my comfort.  I do not experience those paroxysms of grief which others do on the same occasion.  I can exert myself and speak even cheerfully with the poor girls.  But alone, or if anything touches me—­the choking sensation.  I have been to her room:  there was no voice in it—­no stirring; the pressure of the coffin was visible on