"Her life seemed to me to close prematurely, so useful was she, and
so much occupied in doing good; and yet she was in her seventieth
year. It is now more than forty-five years since we were
married,--a long time, as the world goes, for husband and wife to
live together. Bitter as the separation is, I give thanks that she
has been spared to me so long, and that for nearly a half-century I
have had the benefit of her counsel and her example."
In a brief memoir of their intercourse, prepared for the eyes of his
daughters alone, he said:--
"I never wrote a poem that I did not repeat to her, and take her
judgment upon it. I found its success with the public to be
precisely in proportion to the impression it made upon her. She
loved my verses, and judged them kindly, but did not like them all
equally well."