religious history of New England--not to say of our whole
country--and no student of that history is unfamiliar with that
character so tried, yet so exalted by suffering; with that ministry so
faithful, so unselfish, marked by such yearning for souls, and with such
persistence, tact, and success in leading them to Christ; with that
intellect so richly endowed and so well trained; that devotional spirit
so rapt, that conscience so acutely sensitive; with that life so
fruitful and that death so triumphant....
* * * * *
In the summer of 1869 she found a lovely and peaceful retreat among the
hills of Vermont. There arose that tasteful home with which, perhaps
more than any other spot, memory loves to associate her. There, for ten
happy summers, she enjoyed the communion with Nature's "visible forms,"
and heard her "various language," and felt her healing touch on the
wearied brain and overstrung nerves; there, as I think she would have
wished, she took leave of earth amid the pomp and flush of the late
summer, and gladly ascended to the eternal sunshine of heaven; and
there, in the shadow of the giant hills which "brought peace" to her,
and the changing moods of which she so loved to study, her ashes await
the morning of the Resurrection.
In reviewing this life of nearly sixty years, we find its keynote, as
was said at the outset, in the thought of the Christian comforter. We
see in her one whom God commissioned, so far as we can judge, to bring
light and comfort to multitudes, and whom He prepared for that blessed
work by peculiar and severe discipline.
There is nothing in which ordinary minds are more commonly mistaken than
in their estimate of _suffering._ They seem often unable to conceive it
except in its association with appreciable tragedies, in those grosser
forms in which it waits upon visible calamity. Such do not know that the
heart is often the scene of tragedies which can not be written, and that
there are sufferings more subtle and more acute than any which torture
the nerve or wring the brow. Take a character like this with which we
are dealing; combine the nature to which love was a necessity of being
with those high and pure ideals of character which culled cautiously the
objects of affection; add the intense sensitiveness without the self-
esteem which so often serves as a rock of refuge to the most sensitive;
add the sharply-cut individuality which could only see and
|