The day of days in Collingwood's life had at last arrived--that day to
which he had looked forward throughout the weary years, when, his task
honourably concluded, he could know that every beat of the waves was
bearing him towards home and his loved ones. Yet as, prostrated with
weakness, he lay in his cabin, listening to the familiar fret of the
waters, he understood that the burden had been borne too long, the
promised relief had come too late.

With the same dauntless courage with which he had faced existence he now
accepted the knowledge that this day--the thought of which had sustained
him through loneliness and battle and tempest--was to prove the day of his
death. History indeed presents few events of an irony more profound. At
sunset on March 6th, Collingwood set sail for England; at sunset on the
7th, he lay dead, and that fortitude with which he met a fate, the
harshness of which must have cruelly enhanced his bodily anguish, presents
to all time a sublime ending to a sublime career.

Meanwhile in England those whom he had loved continued to count the
lessening days to his return and to plan with tender solicitude every
means for cherishing and restoring the enfeebled frame which they fondly
believed needed but care and happiness to endow it with renewed health.
Little as they recked of the burden which the waves were, in truth,
bringing them, the knowledge, when it arrived, came with a blow which
stunned. In the first announcement of the news, the very terseness of the
communication seems to recreate more vividly the intense feeling which the
writer knew required no insistence.

On April 17th, 1810, Stanhope wrote briefly to the Vicar of Newcastle:--