m for Heaven was too
stretching to something in me that grew mortally tired of stretching.
I have set myself with all diligence to enjoy the things of this world
in the time that's left me. The more I think of it the more nearly
certain I am that they were meant for us.

One thing alone troubles me--that is, the thought of William going up
and down these thirty years just preaching and praying and bearing
other people's burdens and never once having the right to step aside
and rest his soul from being just good; never once having a natural
human vacation in the natural human world; always praying and preaching
and fasting that he might pray and preach better, always scrimping that
he might be able to pay more to the cause of missions, always a little
threadbare, and often a little breathless spiritually, but always
persistently stalking Peter and Paul and the angels through the
Scriptures up the high and higher altitudes of his own beautiful
imagination. No matter how rested he is now in Heaven, no matter how
much he may be enjoying himself, my heart aches for him because of the
innocent happiness he missed here.

Sometimes, when I am with Sarah's girls at a play like Sudermann's
"John the Baptist," as the curtain rises and falls upon the great
scenes I sit and think of him and what it would have meant to him if in
all those poverty-stricken years of his ministry he could have had such
a vision of his dear Bible people at home in Judaea. It's foolish, of
course, but I still long to do something for him, something to make up
for the weariness and blindness through which he passed with such
simple dignity up to God, who never meant for him to make such a hard
journey of it. No one knew it, probably, save a few of the angels, but
he was a great man.

Since I have been here where everybody and every thought of everybody
is so different from him and his thinking, I can see him plainer,
understand him better than I did living side by side with him. This is
why I have been spending my time between tea parties and lectures on
art and evolution, and receptions and theaters, writing these letters
as a memorial of him.

I used to wish I could have a portrait of him painted by a great artist
as he looked sometimes on a Sabbath day when he had a baby to baptize,
or when he'd be bending above an altar full of penitents. There was a
grandeur in William's faith that gave him an awful near likeness to
immortality even in his