Ticknor will retain his office till your return."
During his second visit to Europe in the year 1835, this time
accompanied by his wife, she became ill and died at Rotterdam,
"closing her peaceful life by a still more peaceful death." Longfellow
continued his journey and his studies. Into his lonely hours, which no
society and no occupation could fill, came, his brother tells us, "the
sense and assurance of the spiritual presence of her who had loved him
and who loved him still, and whose dying lips had said, 'I will be
with you and watch over you.'" At Christmas of the same year a new
grief fell upon him in the death of his brother-in-law and dearest
friend. He received it as an added admonition "to set about the things
he had to do in greater earnestness."
"Henceforth," he wrote, "let me bear upon my shield the holy cross."
No history of Longfellow can hope to trace the springs which fed his
poetic mind without recording the deep sorrows, the pain, the
loneliness of his days. Born with especial love of home and all
domesticities, the solitary years moved on, bringing him a larger
power for soothing the grief of others because he had himself known
the darkest paths of earthly experience.
He continued his lonely studies at Heidelberg during the winter, but
with the spring, when the almond-trees were blossoming, the spirit of
youth revived and he again took up his pilgrimage and began the
sketches published some years later as the consecutive story of
"Hyperion.
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