She had heard from the Helpstone people of her husband's miserable plight, had divined the truth, and without delay had set off to meet him. With much coaxing, and an admission that she was his second wife, he was induced to allow himself to be put into the cart and driven to Northborough.
Perchance he might have recovered had affluence been his lot, and he could have been left quiet in the bosom of his family. But it was thought advisable to remove him to Northampton County Asylum, where he passed the long dark evening of his life—twenty-two years in a madhouse!
"When all the hopes that charmed him once were o'er,
To warm his soul in ecstasy no more,
By disappointments proved a foolish cheat,
Each ending bitter and beginning sweet;"
when the last dim light of these illusive horizons had vanished and sunk into night, with that wondrous instinct which had been deceived so oft, yet never could be destroyed, Clare's heart turned again towards the hopes of an unknown blessed land of rest and peace, and from his prison he uttered the cry—
"I long for the scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept:
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie—
The grass below; above the vaulted sky."
This was his dying note; he wrote no more. The spring of 1864 came and found the much-tried poet sinking quietly to rest. On the 20th of May he gently passed away : his last words, "I want to go home,"—the cry of the wearied, wandering child, who longs for the safety and repose of its father's arms.
One or two pious hearts in Northampton, who knew how he had loved his native scenes, came forward to save his remains from a pauper's grave. They remembered that he had said—
"O let one wish, go where I will, be mine—
To turn me back and wander home to die,
'Mong nearest friends my latest breath resign,
And in the churchyard with my kindred lie."
