Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

[331] and a girl. The loss of the boy, whom the father had “named admiringly, gratefully, reverently,” Charles Follen, was a terrible blow to the reformer, and a life-long grief to the mother. He seemed to have been a singularly beautiful, winning, and affectionate little man and to have inspired sweet hopes of future “usefulness and excellence” in the breasts of his parents. “He seemed born to take a century on his shoulders, without stooping; his eyes were large, lustrous, and charged with electric light, his voice was clear as a bugle, melodious, and ever ringing in our ears, from the dawn of day to the ushering in of night, so that since it has been stilled, our dwelling has seemed to be almost without an occupant,” lamented the stricken father to Elizabeth Pease, of Darlington, England.

“ Death itself to me is not terrible, is not repulsive,” poured the heartbroken pioneer into the ears of his English friend,

is not to be deplored. I see in it as clear an evidence of Divine wisdom and beneficence as I do in the birth of a child, in the works of creation, in all the arrangements and operations of nature. I neither fear nor regret its power. I neither expect nor supplicate to be exempted from its legitimate action. It is not to be chronicled among calamities; it is not to be styled “a mysterious dispensation of Divine Providence;” it is scarcely rational to talk of being resigned to it. For what is more rational, what more universal, what more impartial, what more serviceable, what more desirable, in God's own time, hastened neither by our ignorance or folly? . . .

When, therefore, my dear friend, I tell you that the loss of my dear boy has overwhelmed me with