On the next page in due course Richard wrote up the Minutes for the Vestry meeting held on April 11^th and thus surrendered his book and his Clerkship. Just under three weeks later his book of poetry was ready for its dedication. He called the volume STRAY LEAVES FROM AN OLD TREE. Selections From The Scribblings Of An Octogenarian; he dedicated it to Mark Antony Lower:

Like some lone Tree that on the waste appears,
I’ve braved the pelting storms of Eighty Winters;
Passed heedless by - perchance the butt of jeers –
For nought remains but shapeless scrags and splinters.

And yet a few stray leaves the trunk surround,
Till wildly driven by tempestuous weather;
Can no kind hand in sympathy be found
To glean the scattered foliage together?

Yes, thou, my son, wilt lend thy friendly aid,
To gather up these crumpled leaves half rotten;
Thus when thy sire in silent dust is laid,
His humble name will not be quite forgotten.

May those we leave by this memento know
The mutual love, that sacred bond, that ever
Sweetly subsisted while we dwelt below,
That death itself most vainly strove to sever.

Chiddingly, May 1^st, 1862.

Published in Lewes by George P. Bacon, the first printing of Stray Leaves sold out, but it does not ever seem to have been reissued. Today copies are hard to come by. The Sussex Archaeological Society has one in its library and another on display in Ann of Cleves House; the East Sussex County Library has one copy and so has the British Library. As for the rest, a few score perhaps in private homes, they are collector’s pieces.

Not long after publishing Stray Leaves, Richard Lower left Chiddingly to live with his son Joseph’s family in Tunbridge; a Sussex man if ever there was one, gone to Kent to die. And there he died – at 359 Swan Lane, Tunbridge, of an enlarged prostate, on September 13^th, 1865. He was six days short of his 84^th birthday.

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