, April 26th,
1835, a few days before her death? 'How many blessed groups this hour
are wending!'] These notices of Mrs. Hemans would be very unsatisfactory
to her intimate friends, as indeed they are to myself, not so much for
what is said, but what for brevity's sake is left unsaid. Let it suffice
to add there was much sympathy between us, and if opportunity had been
allowed me to see more of her, I should have loved and valued her
accordingly. As it is, I remember her with true affection for her
amiable qualities, and above all for her delicate and irreproachable
conduct during her long separation from an unfeeling husband, whom she
had been led to marry from the romantic notions of inexperienced youth.
Upon this husband I never heard her cast the least reproach, nor did I
ever hear her even name him, though she did not forbear wholly to touch
upon her domestic position; but never so as that any fault could be
found with her manner of adverting to it.

511. _Dead friends: 'Immortals.'_ [XV.]

Walter Scott died 21st Sept. 1832.
S.T. Coleridge " 25th July 1834.
Charles Lamb " 27th Dec. 1834.
Geo. Crabbe " 3rd Feb. 1832.
Felicia Hemans " 16th May 1835.

512. *_Ode: Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of early
Childhood_. [Headed in I.F. MSS. 'The Ode.']

This was composed during my residence at Town-End, Grasmere. Two years
at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the
remaining part. To the attentive and competent reader the whole
sufficiently explains itself, but there may be no harm in adverting here
to particular feelings or _experiences_ of my own mind on which the
structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in
childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my
own being. I have said elsewhere

'A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?'[11]

[11] In pencil on opposite page--But this first stanza of 'We are Seven'
is Coleridge's Jem and all (Mr. Quillinan).

But it was not so much from the source of animal vivacity that _my_
difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit
within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and
almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I
should be translated in something of the same way to he