old couple. After their death, which
was within a day of each other, she refused, perhaps from pride, to take
up her residence with Leonard; but she settled near the home which he
subsequently found in England. Leonard remained abroad for some years.
A quiet observer of the various manners and intellectual development of
living races, a rapt and musing student of the monuments that revive
the dead, his experience of mankind grew large in silence, and his
perceptions of the Sublime and Beautiful brightened into tranquil art
under their native skies.

On his return to England he purchased a small house amidst the most
beautiful scenes of Devonshire, and there patiently commenced a work
in which he designed to bequeath to his country his noblest thoughts
in their fairest forms. Some men best develop their ideas by constant
exercise; their thoughts spring from their brain ready-armed, and seek,
like the fabled goddess, to take constant part in the wars of men. And
such are, perhaps, on the whole, the most vigorous and lofty writers;
but Leonard did not belong to this class. Sweetness and serenity were
the main characteristics of his genius; and these were deepened by his
profound sense of his domestic happiness. To wander alone with Helen
by the banks of the murmurous river; to gaze with her on the deep still
sea; to feel that his thoughts, even when most silent, were comprehended
by the intuition of love, and reflected on that translucent sympathy so
yearned for and so rarely found by poets,--these were the Sabbaths of
his soul, necessary to fit him for its labours: for the Writer has this
advantage over other men, that his repose is not indolence. His duties,
rightly fulfilled, are discharged to earth and men in other capacities
than those of action. If he is not seen among those who act, he is
all the while maturing some noiseless influence, which will guide or
illumine, civilize or elevate, the restless men whose noblest actions
are but the obedient agencies of the thoughts of writers. Call not,
then, the Poet whom we place amidst the Varieties of Life, the sybarite
of literary ease, if, returning on Summer eves, Helen's light footstep
by his musing side, he greets his sequestered home, with its trellised
flowers smiling out from amidst the lonely cliffs in which it is
embedded; while lovers still, though wedded long, they turn to each
other, with such deep joy in their speaking eyes, grateful that the
world, with its