the mind being on the full stretch, sinks and needs relief.

I have a gentleman from Newcastle for my Captain, but he is a man of
no talent as a sea-officer and of little assistance to me.

How glad I shall be to get to my garden again at Morpeth and quitting
the foe, see for the rest of my life only friends about me.


Ever through the thunder of cannon or the stress of a watch which ceased
neither day nor night, through the threatenings of death or the
allurements of fame, one thought was paramount in Collingwood's mind. A
yearning for a peaceful garden he had left behind--to him a veritable
garden of Paradise--for the innocent prattle of his children, the sweet
companionship of his wife. A dream of reunion tormented and sustained him.
"Whenever I think how I am to be happy again my thoughts carry me back to
Morpeth," he wrote. Incapable of a dramatic appeal to sympathy, his
letters to Stanhope, in their strong self-repression, breathe a longing
the more profound. For that Paradise of his dreams Collingwood would have
joyfully bartered fame, emolument, all that the world could offer, had not
duty claimed from him a prolonged sacrifice of all which he held dear.
Whether, if he could have looked on through the few remaining years of his
life and have foreseen the end of that longing and those dreams, his weary
spirit could still have borne the burden laid upon it, none may say. But
buoyed up by that ever-present hope he faced the strain of his eternal
watching with an unflinching courage, which may have been occasionally
strengthened by a recollection which visited him, and the remarkable
circumstances of which cannot be ignored.

For the week before the war had broken out, Collingwood, in the peace of