he coroner's jury brought in a
verdict of lunacy." Charles writes to Coleridge:--

"With me the former things are passed away, and I have something
more to do than to feel. God Almighty has us well in his keeping."

The horror of the event made so deep an impression upon his mind that he
thought he never fully recovered from it. For many, many years it hung
over him like a pall, casting a sort of despairing darkness over all
that might have been bright in life. Think of that tender and sensitive
soul in the awful solitude of the nights which followed the tragedy: the
sister he loved removed from him to an asylum; the mother sleeping in
her unhonored grave; the father, worse than dead, in almost drivelling
idiocy, to be cared for at his hands; the awful doom of the family ever
hanging over his own head,--what depths of passionate sorrow must he
have waded through in those bitter hours, what unavailing tears he must
have shed, what rebellious thoughts may there not have been in his
heart!

But he kept a cheerful front, and went about his daily toil, as he needs
must, with as little outward show of pain as possible.

Mary soon grew better, and he exerted himself to have her released from
confinement. He succeeded in doing so by entering into a solemn
agreement to make her his charge for life, and to watch over her that
she should do no harm. When she was returned to him he was almost happy
again, in spite of the shadow caused by the memory of what had happened,
as well as by the uncertainty of the future. He had but one hundred
pounds a year from his clerkship, and there was a maiden aunt as well as
the father to be cared for. But he says cheerfully:--

"If my father, my aunt, my sister, and an old maid servant cannot
live comfortably on one hundred and twenty or one hundred and
thirty pounds a year, we ought to burn by slow fires; and I almost
would, that Mary might not go to a hospital."

And he hoped to earn the twenty or thirty pounds by literature. His
father had to be amused by cribbage; and many were the weary hours that
Charles would sit playing with him, to the neglect of his
correspondence, his friends, the thousand-and-one private interests
which filled up his little leisure. Sometimes he would try to be let
off, but the old man would say, reproachfully, "If you won't play with
me, you might as well not come home at all;" and the dutiful son set to
afresh. There is a sort of h