again near you, to finish
the work you have so well begun.

Accept my affectionate and mournful sentiment.

LAFAYETTE.

The day after he received his father's letter he left Washington and
wrote from Baltimore, where he stopped over Sunday with a friend, on
February 13:--

MY DEAR FATHER,--The heart-rending tidings which you communicated reached
me in Washington on Friday evening. I left yesterday morning, spend this
day here at Mr. Cushing's, and set out on my return home to-morrow. I
shall reach Philadelphia on Monday night, New York on Tuesday night, and
New Haven on Wednesday night.

Oh! is it possible, is it possible? Shall I never see my dear wife again?

But I cannot trust myself to write on this subject. I need your prayers
and those of Christian friends to God for support. I fear I shall sink
under it.

Oh! take good care of her dear children.

Your agonized son,
FINLEY.

Another son had been born to him on January 20, 1825, and he was now left
with three motherless children to provide for, and without the sustaining
hope of a speedy and permanent reunion with them and with his beloved
wife.

Writing to a friend more than a month after the death of his wife, he
says:--

"Though late in performing the promise I made you of writing you when I
arrived home, I hope you will attribute it to anything but forgetfulness
of that promise. The confusion and derangement consequent on such an
afflicting bereavement as I have suffered have rendered it necessary for
me to devote the first moments of composure to looking about me, and to
collecting and arranging the fragments of the ruin which has spread such
desolation over all my earthly prospects.

"Oh! what a blow! I dare not yet give myself up to the full survey of its
desolating effects. Every day brings to my mind a thousand new and fond
connections with dear Lucretia, all now ruptured. I feel a dreadful void,
a heart-sickness, which time does not seem to heal but rather to
aggravate.

"You know the intensity of the attachment which existed between dear
Lucretia and me, never for a moment interrupted by the smallest cloud; an
attachment founded, I trust, in the purest love, and daily strengthening
by all the motives which the ties of nature and, more especially, of
religion, furnish.

"I found in dear Lucretia everything I could wish. Such ardor of
affection, so uniform, so unaffected, I never saw nor read of but in her.
My fear with regard to the m