masters, and occasional reading of the earlier and the living
novelists, tales of wild romance and lighter fiction, voyages and
travels, biographies and letters. Nor was he without a strong interest
in the current politics of his own country and of England, as to which
his principles were highly conservative.

Upon his marriage with the daughter of the late Judge Dana, in 1830,
he removed to Cambridge, and soon afterwards began the preparation of
a course of lectures on Art, which he intended to deliver to a select
audience of artists and men of letters in Boston. Four of these he
completed. Rough drafts of two others were found among his papers, but
not in a state fit for publication. In 1841, he published his tale of
"Monaldi," a production of his early life. The poems in the present
volume, not included in the volume of 1813, are, with two exceptions,
the work of his later years. In them, as in his paintings of the
same period, may be seen the extreme attention to finish, always his
characteristic, which, added to increasing bodily pain and infirmity,
was the cause of his leaving so much that is unfinished behind him.

His death occurred at his own house, in Cambridge, a little past
midnight on the morning of Sunday, the 9th of July, 1843. He had
finished a day and week of labor in his studio, upon his great picture
of Belshazzar's Feast; the fresh paint denoting that the last touches
of his pencil were given to that glorious but melancholy monument of
the best years of his later life. Having conversed with his retiring
family with peculiar solemnity and earnestness upon the obligation and
beauty of a pure spiritual life, and on the realities of the world to
come, he had seated himself at his nightly employment of reading and
writing, which he usually carried into the early hours of the morning.
In the silence and solitude of this occupation, in a moment,