Late in September the same family-party crossed the sea to Calais.

How different a voyage for them all from the merry departures of bygone Maytides! Which way should they turn?
Not to Paris, for _there_ was the cause of all these ills; so they went straight southwards, through Normandy to the Loire, and saw the chateaux and churches from Orleans to Tours, famous for their Renaissance architecture and for the romance of their chivalric history.

Amboise especially made a strong impression upon the languid and unwilling invalid.

It stirred him up to write, in easy verse, the tale of love and death that his own situation too readily suggested.

In "The Broken Chain" he indulged his gloomy fancy, turning, as it was sure to do, into a morbid nightmare of mysterious horror, not without reminiscence of Coleridge's "Christabel." But through it all he preserved, so to speak, his dramatic incognito; his own disappointment and his own anticipated death were the motives of the tale, but treated in such a manner as not to betray his secret, nor even to wound the feelings of the lady who now was beyond appeal from an honourable lover--taking his punishment like a man.
This poem lasted him, for private writing, all through that journey--a fit emblem of the broken life which it records.