A rich, but sad light, of rather a purple than a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon Hills at that moment; and, thinking it probable that it might be the last time Sir Walter would cross the stream, I was not a little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet beginning, 'A trouble, not of clouds,' &c.
At noon on Thursday we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day, Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation, _tete-a-tete_, when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, upon the whole, he had led.

He had written in my daughter's album, before he came into the breakfast-room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her; and while putting the book into her hand, in his own Study, standing by his desk, he said to her in my presence, 'I should not have done any thing of this kind, but for your father's sake; they are probably the last verses I shall ever write.' They show how much his mind was impaired; not by the strain of thought, but by the execution, some of the lines being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding rhymes.

One letter, the initial S., had been omitted in the spelling of his own name.

In this interview, also, it was that, upon my expressing a hope of his health being benefited by the climate of the country to which he was going, and by the interest he would take in the classic remembrances of Italy, he made use of the quotation from 'Yarrow Revisited,' as recorded by me in the 'Musings at Aquapendente,' six years afterwards.
Mr.Lockhart has mentioned in his life of him, what I heard from several quarters while abroad, both at Rome and elsewhere, that little seemed to interest him but what he could collect or heard of the fugitive Stuarts, and their adherents who had followed them into exile.

Both the 'Yarrow Revisited' and the 'Sonnet' were sent him before his departure from England.