e mixed up with the flying masses, as it seemed
inextricably. Ruined habitations, wagons and provision-vans overturned
and pillaged, men dying by scores from hunger and starvation, and frozen
corpses of men and horses, were objects that constantly presented
themselves. At length they crossed the Niemen and pursued their journey
through Poland, still suffering terribly from the cold and from the
insufficient nature of the food obtainable; but on reaching Zarrow,[C]
an obscure village near Cracow, the poet was seized with a sudden and
fatal attack of pneumonia, the result, no doubt, of privation and
exposure. He was borne to a little Jewish cottage, the only inn that the
village afforded, and there died December 26, 1812. His remains were
interred in the little churchyard of the village where he died. It is
rarely that an American visits his grave, and the government has never
taken interest enough in its minister to erect a memorial slab above his
dust; but wifely devotion has supplied the omission, and a plain
monument of marble, on which are inscribed his name, age and station and
the circumstances of his death, marks the poet's place of sepulture.

The news of his death seems not to have reached the United States until
the succeeding March. The Federal journals merely announced the fact
without comment: the Republican papers published formal eulogiums on the
dead statesman. President Madison, in his inaugural of 1813, thus
referred to the event: "The sudden death of the distinguished citizen
who represented the United States in France, without any special
arrangement by him for such a conclusion, has kept us without the
expected sequel to his last communications; nor has the French
government taken any measures for bringing the depending negotiations to
a conclusion through its representative in the United States."

In France the poet's demise excited a more general feeling of regret,
perhaps, than in his own country. A formal eulogy on his life and
character was pronounced by Dupont de Nemours before the Society for the
Encouragement of National Industry, and the year succeeding his death an
account of his life and writings was published at Paris in quarto form,
accompanied by one canto of _The Columbiad_, translated into French
heroic verse. The American residents of Paris also addressed a letter of
condolence to Mrs. Barlow, in which is apparent the general sentiment of
respect and affection entertained for the poe