A Mad Poetess--sad sight.
-- The daughter of Sumner Lincoln Fairfield, who frequently visited Richmond, disposing of her works, has become insane, and is now an inmate of an asylum in Washington city. A correspondent of the Home Journal who visited her, says:‘ Cross-legged upon the round table, in the centre of the room, was seated a woman, perhaps thirty years of age, who had the remains of remarkable beauty; the finest of large, dark, wild eyes, and features which, though ghastly pale, were exceedingly well cut and expressive. Her long gray hair was dishevelled, and of her dress and appearance she evidently had not a thought; but, open upon her lap was a volume from which she was pretending to read aloud, making an unintelligible and incoherent gabble. By her side lay a handsomely printed volume of a novel of her own writing, with her own likeness as a frontispiece, and she had gone crazy as an authoress? It was a daughter of the poet, Sumner Lincoln Fairfield, and she had started with great promise, publishing her first book in Boston. Both of her parents, it will be remembered, were of the over-imaginative class, and it proved that the two-fold inheritance of the gift was too much. But what a pity is such an apparently unnecessary wreck of the lifetime of a beautiful girl; for I am told that her recovery is hopeless. The Doctor said that, for seconds only, she regained her consciousness; and asked me to address some remark to her. I did, observing that she must be very lonely, sometimes, in that unfurnished room. Her attention was arrested by my voice, and she stared around and fixed her large, dark eyes upon me. ‘"Yes,"’ she said, ‘"these asylums are the mournfullest of weary places?"’ Alas for the head that is to go wild with its over- endowings!
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