s to her mother: "I am very wretched: am I
never to hear from you again? I am homesick. I know I am foolish, but
I cannot help it. To tell the truth, I am half sick, I am so weak, so
languid. I cannot eat. I am nervous; I know I am. I weep most of the
time. I have blotted the paper so that I cannot write. I cannot study
much longer if I do not hear from you." Her disease appears now to
have assumed a fixed character, and in her next letter, she expresses
a fear that it is beyond the reach of human art. Her mother, herself
ill, set off at once for Albany, and was received by her child with
rapture. "O mamma, I thought I should never have seen you again! But,
now I have you here, I can lay my aching head upon your bosom. I shall
soon be better."

The journey homeward, though made in the heats of July, was attended
with less suffering than was anticipated. "Her joy," says her mother,
"upon finding herself at home, operated for a time like magic." The
progress of disease seemed to be suspended. Those around her received
new hope; but she herself was not deceived, and she calmly waited for
that great change which for her possessed no terrors, for her hopes as
to the future rested upon a sure foundation.

But one fear disturbed her, to which she refers in the following, the
last piece she ever composed, and which is left unfinished:--

"There is a something which I dread;
It is a dark and fearful thing;
It steals along with withering tread,
Or sweeps on wild destruction's wing.

That thought comes o'er me in the hour
Of grief, of sickness, or of sadness;
'Tis not the dread of death; 'tis more,--
It is the dread of madness.

O, may these throbbing pulses pause,
Forgetful of their feverish course;
May this hot brain, which, burning, glows
With all a fiery whirlpool's force,--

Be cold, and motionless, and still,
A tenant of its lowly bed;
But let not dark delirium steal----"

She died on the 27th August, 1825. Her literary labors will surprise
all who remember that she had not yet reached her seventeenth
birthday. They consist of two hundred and seventy-eight poetical
pieces, of which there are five regular poems, of several cantos each;
three unfinished romances; a complete tragedy, written at thirteen
years of age; and twenty-four school exercises; besides letters, of
which forty are preserved, written in the course of a few months, to
her mother alone. Indeed, we canno