"'Days without night, joys without sorrow, sanctity without sin, charity without stain, possession without fear, satiety without envyings, communication of joys without lessening, and they shall dwell in a blessed country, where an enemy never entered, and from whence a friend never went away.'[430]
"But yet—oh my darling! my darling!"
To MISS LEYCESTER.
"Sunday morning, Nov. 13.—My darling Mother has entered into the real life.
"She grew gradually weaker hour by hour, and I think she suffered less. She knew me always, and liked to keep her eyes constantly fixed upon me, but she could not speak. At half-past nine, she seemed sinking, and I repeated over to her, as she desired me to do when she was dying, the hymn 'How bright those glorious spirits shine.' I think she heard it.... Soon after she opened her eyes and gave me a long, long look of her own perfect lovingness, then turned to Lea, to me again, and we heard a few gentle sighs. I had just time to ring the bell close to my hand as I sat on the pillow, and as John and Harriet[431] (who had been waiting in the passage) passed sobbing into the room and stood at the foot of the bed, my sweet darling gently breathed her last in my arms, once more—quite at the last—opening her eyes, with a look of perfect bliss, as if gazing at something beyond us. It was so gentle a breathing out of her spirit, we scarcely knew when it was over. She died in my arms, with my kiss upon her forehead, at half-past ten. I know how tenderly my Mother's dearest, most tenderly loved friend feels for me, and that I need not ask her to pray for my Mother's poor child Augustus."
"Nov. 14.—It seems so strange to look out of the window and see the same sheep feeding in the same green meadows, the same flowers blooming, and yet such a change over all. I feel as if it were I who had died yesterday.
"What a long, long day it was! A thousand times I was on the point of running into the room to say some little loving word to her who has been the recipient of every thought, every pleasure for so many, many years, and then the crushing blank, the annihilation came all afresh. Indeed, I feel it afresh every quarter of an hour, and when I am calmed after one thing in which my great desolation is especially presented to me, something else calls it all forth again. Oh, my darling! my darling! can it be? oh! how can it be?
"The dear earthly form lies with its hands sweetly folded as if she were praying. I go in often. I am always going in; but it does not remind me of her, though it is most peaceful, and the servants and others have the greatest comfort from looking at it.
"It is as a dream that yesterday morning, quite after it was over, I could say 'The day before yesterday my darling did this, my darling said that.' On Friday she was so bright, so happy, only her memory a little astray, but I was already forming a thousand little schemes for supplying this lost power, so that it should not be apparent to others, and to me nothing, I felt, could ever matter if the sunshine of my dear Mother's sweet presence was with me under any change."
"Tuesday, Nov. 15.—Your most dear letter has come.... How much, even in the first anguish of my desolation, I have felt what it would be to you also. You will always be most tenderly entwined with her sacred memory; indeed, I can scarcely think of you apart. For the last few years especially your companionship has been her greatest joy, and in your absence she has never passed many hours without speaking of you, never any, I think, without thinking of you. The grief she most dreaded was that she might have to mourn for you, for I think she rightly felt that—great as the sorrow would be—your physical powers would enable you to bear the separation better than she could have done.