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humble but passionate devotee I could not ascertain; her life was too obscure and lonely to furnish much personal anecdote, but among her poetical effusions are several written in a broken and irregular manner, and evidently under great agitation.
The following sonnet is the most coherent and most descriptive of her peculiar state of mind:
"Well, thou art gone--but what wert thou to me? I never saw thee--never heard thy voice, Yet my soul seemed to claim affiance with thee. The Roman bard has sung of fields Elysian, Where the soul sojourns ere she visits earth; Sure it was there my spirit knew thee, Byron! Thine image haunted me like a past vision; It hath enshrined itself in my heart's core; 'Tis my soul's soul--it fills the whole creation. For I do live but in that world ideal Which the muse peopled with her bright fancies, And of that world thou art a monarch real, Nor ever earthly sceptre ruled a kingdom, With sway so potent as thy lyre, the mind's dominion."
Taking all the circumstances here adduced into consideration, it is evident that this strong excitement and exclusive occupation of the mind upon one subject, operating upon a system in a high state of morbid irritability, was in danger of producing that species of mental derangement called monomania. The poor little being was aware, herself, of the dangers of her case, and alluded to it in the following passage of a letter to Colonel Wildman, which presents one of the most lamentable pictures of anticipated evil ever conjured up by the human mind.
"I have long," writes she, "too sensibly felt the decay of my mental faculties, which I consider as the certain indication of that dreaded calamity which I anticipate with such terror. A strange idea has long haunted my mind, that Swift's dreadful fate will be mine. It is not ordinary insanity I so much apprehend, but something worse--absolute idiotism!
"O sir! think what I must suffer from such an idea, without an earthly friend to look up to for protection in such a wretche