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[268] was ready to die for a principle and starve for an idea; nor think to claim any merit for it! What measureless power this has! With what hooks of steel this binds men to one! A dear lovable woman, welcome at a sick bedside ; as much in place there as when facing an angry nation; contented in the home she made; the loyal friend ; such ingenuity in devising ways to help you; the stalwart fidelity of friendship, rare in these easy going, half-and-half, non-committal days; such friendship as allowed no word of disparagement, no doubt of a friend's worth, to insult her presence. A wise counsellor, one who made your troubles hers and pondered thoughtfully before she spoke her hearty word : we feel we have lost one who would have stood by us in trouble, a shield. She was the kind of woman one would choose to represent woman's entrance into broader life. Modest, womanly, simple, sincere, solid, real, loyal; to be trusted; equal to affairs and yet above them; mother-wit ripened by careful training, and enriched with the lore of ages; a companion with the pass-word of every science and all literatures; a hand ready for fireside help and a mystic loving to wander on the edge of the actual, reaching out and up into the infinite and the unfathomable ; so that life was lifted to romance, to heroism and the loftiest faith. May we also have a faith that is almost sight. How joyful to remember, dear friend, your last counsel, the words you thought spirit hands had traced for your epitaph: “You think us dead. We are not dead; we are the living.”
Boston, Hougton Mifflin, 1884.
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