My death is rapidly approaching and you are not near to watch the flitting and vanishing of my spirit.  Do no[t] regret this; for death is a too terrible an [sic] object for the living.  It is one of those adversities which hurt instead of purifying the heart; for it is so intense a misery that it hardens & dulls the feelings.  Dreadful as the time was when I pursued my father towards the ocean, & found their [sic] only his lifeless corpse; yet for my own sake I should prefer that to the watching one by one his senses fade; his pulse weaken—­and sleeplessly as it were devour his life in gazing.  To see life in his limbs & to know that soon life would no longer be there; to see the warm breath issue from his lips and to know they would soon be chill—­I will not continue to trace this frightful picture; you suffered this torture once; I never did.[85] And the remembrance fills your heart sometimes with bitter despair when otherwise your feelings would have melted into soft sorrow.

So day by day I become weaker, and life flickers in my wasting form, as a lamp about to loose it vivifying oil.  I now behold the glad sun of May.  It was May, four years ago, that I first saw my beloved father; it was in May, three years ago that my folly destroyed the only being I was doomed to love.  May is returned, and I die.  Three days ago, the anniversary of our meeting; and, alas! of our eternal seperation, after a day of killing emotion, I caused myself to be led once more to behold the face of nature.  I caused myself to be carried to some meadows some miles distant from my cottage; the grass was being mowed, and there was the scent of hay in the fields; all the earth look[ed] fresh and its inhabitants happy.  Evening approached and I beheld the sun set.  Three years ago and on that day and hour it shone through the branches and leaves of the beech wood and its beams flickered upon the countenance of him whom I then beheld for the last time.[86] I now saw that divine orb, gilding all the clouds with unwonted splendour, sink behind the horizon; it disappeared from a world where he whom I would seek exists not; it approached a world where he exists not[.] Why do I weep so bitterly?  Why my [sic] does my heart heave with vain endeavour to cast aside the bitter anguish that covers it “as the waters cover the sea.”  I go from this world where he is no longer and soon I shall meet him in another.

Farewell, Woodville, the turf will soon be green on my grave; and the violets will bloom on it. There is my hope and my expectation; your’s are in this world; may they be fulfilled.[87]

NOTES TO MATHILDA

Abbreviations: 

F of F—­A The Fields of Fancy, in Lord Abinger’s notebook F of F—­B The Fields of Fancy, in the notebook in the Bodleian Library S-R fr fragments of The Fields of Fancy among the papers of the
               late Sir John Shelley-Rolls, now in the Bodleian Library