In Love to your
selfe and Bro: Charles. From Your Loveing Bro: to Comnd--
Wm. Wright.

"P.S. I've sen you Sum Verses that my wife maid of Dear Lamb
Let me hear from one or both of you as Soon as you think
Convenient."

And these are Hetty's verses inclosed.

A Mother's Address to Her Dying Infant

"Tender softness, infant mild,
Perfect, purest, brightest Child!
Transient lustre, beauteous clay,
Smiling wonder of a day!
Ere the last convulsive start
Rend thy unresisting heart,
Ere the long-enduring swoon
Weigh thy precious eyelids down,
Ah, regard a mother's moan!
--Anguish deeper than thy own.

"Fairest eyes, whose dawning light
Late with rapture blest my sight,
Ere your orbs extinguish'd be,
Bend their trembling beams on me!

"Drooping sweetness, verdant flower
Blooming, withering in an hour,
Ere thy gentle breast sustain
Latest, fiercest, mortal pain,
Hear a suppliant! Let me be
Partner in thy destiny:
That whene'er the fatal cloud
Must thy radiant temples shroud;
When deadly damps, impending now,
Shall hover round thy destin'd brow,
Diffusive may their influence be,
And with the blossom blast the tree!"

Mr. Wright inclosed these verses complacently enough. Poetry in his
eyes was an elegant accomplishment vaguely connected with scholarship
and gentility: and he took pride in possessing a wife who, as he more
than once assured his cronies in the parlour of the "Turk's Head" at
the end of the street, could sit down and write it by the yard.

To please Hetty he read them through, pronounced them very pretty,
and folded up the paper, remarking, "I'll send it off to your brother
John. He likes this sort of thing, and when he learns 'twas written
in your weak state he'll think it wonderful."

Of the anguish in the closing lines his eye detected, his ear heard,
nothing.

Yet it was an anguish which daily touched despair in Hetty's heart.
God had laid a curse on her, and would not be placated by the good
behaviour on which she had built her hopes. She had borne three
children, and not one had He suffered to live for a week. No matter
how many she might bear, the same fate stood ready for them. Nor was
this all. She saw Him smiting, through these innocent babes, at her
husband'