SORROW AND SYMPATHY.

Unwilling to be separated from me, Clara proposed in 1882 that she and her two children should spend the summer in New England. Her Uncle William had placed his furnished house at our disposal; so Mr. Merrick and I had the novel experience of housekeeping in the land of the Pilgrims. We had the social pleasure of entertaining most interesting people, among them Miss Lucretia Noble, the author of “A Reverend Idol.”

After this visit Clara wrote a critique of this much-talked-of book, published in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, in which these words occur: “Miss Noble reminds one forcibly of that charming woman—Genevieve Ward. The identity of the ‘Idol’ is supposed to be established in the character of the worshiped and worshipful Phillips Brooks.” Clara had at times been a newspaper contributor, and often said a timely word for “the Cause that needed assistance.” She had addressed an open letter, just before leaving the city, to Mr. Paul Tulane, the philanthropist whose monument is Tulane University, urging vainly that this great institution should be co-educational in its scope. It was said of her that while her intellect and style were exquisitely womanly they possessed firm rationality and searching analytical qualities.

Rev. W. F. Warren, D. D., president of Boston University, came also with his most attractive family to Wilbraham. The friendship and love of his wife, Harriet Cornelia Merrick, proved a source of great comfort in that season of sorrow, and a true satisfaction as long as she lived. Her vigorous, wholesome, sympathetic nature was one on which everybody was willing to ease off their own burdens. Her intellectual abilities ranked high, for she had acquired the culture of seven years spent in Europe. She was widely known for twenty-four years, as the editor of the Heathen Woman’s Friend—the organ of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She was an artist in music and a master of the French, German and Italian languages. A friend in Germany said: “Her German is perfect. She is never taken for an American; for does she not possess all the virtues of a German housewife? Does she not dearly love to fill her chest with fine linen, and take the best care of her household? And then she cultivates her flowers, makes fine embroideries, and last is a good knitter. She cannot be an American lady!” Yet she was a model mother after the American ideal; besides being a trustee of the New England Conservatory of Music, and a leading officer of numerous other boards. She had a breezy fashion of conversation, a fascinating smile, a cheery word, a fun-sparkling eye and bright hair waving prettily from a broad brow. When I confided to her the fact of my daughter’s threatened life by a latent disease, she gave such heartful sympathy that I have never ceased to be grateful, and shed many tears when she too was called away.

I needed a close friend this sad summer, for though my daughter was not in usual health when we left home, none knew of the presence of a fatal malady. After a physician from Springfield had told us that she might survive a year in a warmer climate, it was difficult to keep strong enough to show her a cheerful face; but the medical orders were that Clara should not be informed of her own danger if we expected to take her home alive. I telegraphed for Mr. Guthrie. When he arrived and saw her looking as usual, sitting by an open window, bright, and beautifully dressed, he sent an immediate message to New Orleans allaying anxiety. But it was soon evident that she had entered upon the beginning of the end. She drove out every day and did not suffer: and we found her serenely conscious of her own condition. She said: “It is all right, if I die. I have been as happy as opportunities, and kindness, and attentions, and love can make a human being. It is beautiful to die here in Wilbraham where every one is so kind.” Every day she was bright and cheerful, and looked her own sweet self. One day her father assisted her into the carriage, and I knew it was for her a last drive. Though almost prostrated with grief, I was able to welcome her cheerfully when she returned. The next morning she got up as usual, and calling for her children, took a tender leave of all of us. “Don’t grieve, mother dear, don’t!” she said; “I am safe in God’s keeping.”“Oh, my child, what can I do without you!” I cried. “Do as other bereaved mothers have done and bear it bravely! and you will have both my little children to rear; they are yours.” When at the last she fixed her beautiful eyes on me and said: “My mother!” her earthly word was silenced, her life-work done.

I find that I wrote thus to a dear friend at that time: “Here I am—sitting in the chamber of my dead. The Marthas and the Marys are here doing according to their natures. Mary sits in the quiet with me, Martha writes of our loss to the absent, or prepares dinner. God help us! the business of life must go on even in the presence of death. My Clara lies on the lounge, wrapped in white cashmere, so still—so cold;—and this is the last day she can so lie before she is buried from my sight. The wind blows cool, as often in a New England August, but it drives pangs into my sore heart, and the day seems different from any other day of my life. Why does God leave us at such times set apart to suffer, as on some eminence? The people pity us. Her father says the time is short and we shall soon go to her. Yes—and then the air and the sunshine will take on a new nature for some one else—for our sakes. But it is different to lay old frames in the dust from putting under the daisies’ bed the young in their glorious prime. God knows best. It may be that she is taken from evil to come. She lived happily, and has laid down all of earth bravely to go into the other life.

“The students stop in passing, and seeing our mourning door ask, ‘Who is dead?’ My dead is nothing to them. They never saw Clara—nor me. It is only an idle question. We are only two atoms among earth’s millions. O Lord, forget not these particles in Thy universe,—for we are being tossed to and fro,—and bring us to a resting place somewhere in Thy eternal kingdom!

“I know the world must still go on, though it is stationary for me, and I am honestly trying to have patience with its cheerful progress; but even the playfulness of my two motherless little ones jars upon me. It is useless for me to try to realize human sympathy from the lonely height where I sit and weep over the untimely death of my two beautiful daughters. They were God-given, and my very own by ties of blood, but more by that happy responsiveness of soul which constitutes ‘born friends.’ After being as the woman whose children rise up and call her blessed, I am now like Rachel of old, refusing to be comforted because they are not. I lie down in humble submission because I cannot help myself. I say over and over, ‘Thy will be done!’—but all the same I would have them back if I could. None of us try to raise a controversy with the inevitable. We are grateful for kind words and sympathy. They cannot change anything, but they give just a drop of comfort to a desolate, disrupted life on the human side of that gateway, through which the majority have gone down into the silence where ‘the dead praise not the Lord.’”

Many testimonies to the character and worth of our child were written and published. They shall speak for her and for the greatness of our loss. The Times-Democrat said: “Wherever she moved she was by the necessities of her sweet nature a ‘bright, particular star’ among earth’s shining ones. Her conversation was a delight to all within sound of her voice. Her wit was gentle, pure, generous and sincere. She ruled all hearts, and loved to rule, for she ruled by love.”

Catharine Cole wrote: “Many men and women famous in the great world of art and literature will pay the sweet tribute of tears to the memory of this lovely woman; and here in our own home, where she was so beloved and admired, her gentle, cheery presence will be missed and mourned for many sad days. She shone like a jewel set amid dross.”

From Mrs. Mollie Moore Davis—widely known for her exquisitely delicate love poems and quaint tales of real life—came this tender word: “I truly appreciated her great gifts and greater loveliness. She is a star gone from my sky.”

Mrs. Mary Ashley Townsend sent me these words: “Her constant and determined intellectual development, her devotion to progress, her literary tastes, her social charms, her reliability as a friend, her loveliness as a wife and mother, formed a combination of qualities that made her the realization of the poet’s dream,

“‘Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.’”

Mrs. Townsend is herself a rarely gifted poet, long and deeply homed in the heart of New Orleans. With the exception of Longfellow and Cable, no writer has so vividly mirrored the very atmosphere of lower Louisiana. In “Down the Bayou” its “heroed past,” its shrined memories find an eloquent voice; there in everlasting tints are painted its dank luxuriance and verdant solitudes; its red-tiled roofs and stucco walls, the “mud-built towers of castled cray-fish,” its sluggish, sinuous bayoux and secrets of lily-laden lagoons, its odors of orange bloom and mossy swamps mingled with flute-toned song and flitting color amid the solemn, dark-hued live-oaks. Mary Ashley Townsend had three lovely daughters. One has passed over the river, but she still has Adele, who resembles her gifted mother, and Daisy, to comfort her life.

James R. Randall, the gifted author of “My Maryland,” said in his own newspaper: “She was too radiantly dowered for this world she glorified. She was all that poets have sung and men have wished daughter and wife to be. Well may the bereaved father and husband wonder with poor Lear ‘why so many mean things live while she has ceased to be.’” Other expressions were as follows: “It is something worth living for, to have been the mother of such a being.” “Outside of your mother-love the loss of the sweet friendship and congeniality of your lives will create an awful void. But that beautiful soul is yours still—growing and developing in Paradise.” “Amid all her charms what impressed me most was her admiration for her mother. She addressed you often and fondly as ‘dear,’ as if you were the child and she the mother.” “Centuries of experience have not developed a philosophy deeper or more comforting for the human race than that of David: ‘He shall not return to me but I shall go to him.’ I thank God for the great gift of death!”A minister of God wrote me, from Worcester, Mass., a word that may be as great a light to some sitting in darkness as it was to me: “I must confess that, for my own part, I take such sorrows with less heaviness of heart than once, for the reason that every such loss seems to strengthen, rather than weaken, my faith in immortality. In good and beautiful lives I see so vividly a revelation of God—the Infinite Holiness and Beauty shining through the human soul and the raiment of clay—that I cannot believe it possible for death to extinguish their real life ‘hidden with Christ in God.’ I cannot believe that they can be ‘holden of the grave.’ I feel assured that theirs is a conscious life of progress and joy, and cannot mourn for them as dead, but only as far away. More and more am I convinced that this vivid feeling of the Divine Presence in beautiful human lives is peculiarly the Christian’s ground of hope in immortality. It was what the apostle meant by ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory,’ and it gives us gradually the clear vision of an immortal world. Only thus, as we gain that ‘knowledge of God’ which is ‘eternal life’ here and now, can we rise above the mist and smoke of this temporal world and lift our eyes ‘unto the hills whence cometh our help.’ Only thus as we live in the eternal world, here and now, can we feel secure that nothing fair and good in human life can perish.”

Mrs. Hannah Whitehall Smith wrote me thus from Philadelphia the sad December of this year:

To that letter I replied: “If the Heavenly Father takes note of the sparrow’s fall, it may be that He put the thought in Miss Willard’s mind to ask you to help me; but, dear lady, you are many a day’s journey ahead of me in religious experience when, in the presence of the death of your beloved, you can say, ‘Thy will be done.’ I wish I could, like you, will whatever God wills.

“I thank you for the account of your Ray, and I thank God that He created such a Christian mother. Simeon said to Mary: ‘Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also.’ Every one who has lost a child has been pierced through and through. In this crisis of my life I am amazed and stupefied by my own capacity for suffering, and actually look upon myself with an awed pity, as I would upon a stranger. How can I yield everything? I had already buried one lovely daughter in the bloom of life; and I had only one left. I submit because I must. My heart cries out for my child; God forgive me, but I would call her back to me if I could.”

When the time drew near for the annual convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, my husband and sons urged that I should go to Detroit, hoping the change of scene and new responsibilities might arouse me from depression. Miss Willard had already written: “My heart turns toward thee in thy desolation. Remember thou hast doting sisters. I believe thy beautiful Clara knows how we rally to thy side, and is glad.”

While I was in Detroit, Hannah Whitehall Smith called upon me several times, and talked about my condition of mind, and so inspired me with gratitude that I endeavored to obey every suggestion she made, regardless of the pride and self-sufficiency which is so common with unsatisfied souls. She seemed to have direct access to the Heavenly Father, and laid my case before Him with such simplicity and faith that my heart was deeply touched, and I gained a new knowledge of spiritual relations. When I learned in these latter days, that she had been called to sorrow over her husband “gone before,” I wrote to her in loving memory of her former goodness, and received a reply, from Eastnor Castle, where she and Lady Henry Somerset had been engaged in preparing a memorial of Miss Willard, which was issued to the people of Great Britain.

The letter reads: “Your loving sympathy in my last great loss has been most welcome. My dear husband had been a great sufferer for eighteen months, and longed so eagerly to go that no one who loved him could be anything but thankful when his release came. I have been enabled to rejoice in his joy of having entered into the presence of the King. It cannot be long for me at the longest before I shall join him, and until then I am hidden in the Divine fortress of God’s love and care. I love to think that you too are hidden there, dear friend and sister, and that together we may meet in the Divine Presence where there is fulness of joy even in the midst of earthly sorrow.

“Lady Henry joins me in love to you. She is, as we are, very sorry over the loss of our beloved Frances Willard; but God still lives and reigns, and in Him we can rest without anxiety. I have found Him a very present help in many a time of trouble, and I rejoice to know I was permitted to help you realize this in your hour of sore need.”