Previous to her marriage she had spent all her summers in the country or in travel, and was wholly unacclimated. Clara wrote thus to Captain S. M. Thomas from Sewanee, Tenn., in September of that dreadful year: “The pity of it, Uncle Milton! You will understand how it is with us at this time. Mother is broken-hearted. You have ever been a large figure in Laura’s and my girlhood recollections, and mother asks me to write to you. Laura Ellen’s death was just as painful as it could be. Father and mother were in Wilbraham, and every one of us gone but dear, good cousin Louise Brewer, and Louis—her husband. Oh! he made a terrible mistake in remaining in that doomed city. I have an added pang that I shall carry with me till I too go away—that I was not with her in her supreme hour.
“The dear girl wrote daily to mother, David, and me, until death snatched away her pen. ‘Fear not for me, dearest mother,’ was on her last postal card. ‘My trust is in God.’ It were enough to make an angel weep if the true history of this awful summer could be written. Our grief is without any alleviation—unless in sister’s beautiful character and Christian life. If I had been there I should have tried with superhuman efforts to hold her back from death. It was Sunday—and Dr. Walker dismissed his congregation at Felicity church to go, at her request, to her deathbed. He has told us of her great faith, her willingness to go, the perfect clearness of her mind, and the calm fortitude she manifested even when she kissed her children good-by. Breathing softly she went to sleep and closed her sweet blue eyes on this world—forever.
“Cousin Louise says Louis was nearly frantic. It is a terrible blow, and he has the added pain of knowing it might have been different but for the fatal mistake of judgment which brought such awful results. I have to school myself, and fight every day a new battle for calmness and resignation. I shall never grow accustomed to the hard fact that her bright and heavenly presence must be forever wanting in her own home, and shall never again grace mine. She died saying, ‘Jesus is with me!’ Well He might be, for she died, as He, sacrificing herself for others.”
There was no one too old or too poor, or too uninteresting to receive Laura’s attention. Sometimes this disposition annoyed me; but though I did not always recognize it, she was always living out the divine altruism of Christ. She was ever active in charities and a useful director of St. Ann’s Asylum.
Among many others I gather the following expressions in letters from those who had known her intimately: “Nobody feared her, everybody loved her. She was an angel for forgiving. The brightness in her life came from the angelic cheerfulness of her own soul, which would not yield to outward conditions. She had an infinite capacity for getting joy out of barren places.”—“I do not hope to know again a nature so blended in sweetness and strength. It is no common chance that takes away a noble mind—so full of meekness yet with so much to justify self-assertion. There was an atmosphere of grace, mercy and peace floating about her, edifying and delighting all who came near.”
Coming from a long line of tender, gentle, saintly women—the Brewers on the Merrick side—she belonged to that type celebrated in story and embalmed in song, of which nearly every generation of Brewers has produced at least one representative human angel.
A more than full measure of days has convinced me that among our permanent joys are the friends who have drifted with our own life current. In addition to the pleasure of communion with lofty and sympathetic spirits such friendships have the “tendency to bring the character into finer life.” “A new friend,” says Emerson, “entering our house is an era in our true history.” Our friends illustrate the course of our conduct. It is the progress of our character that draws them about us. Among those friends whom the struggling years after the war brought to me was Mrs. Anita Waugh, a Boston woman; a sojourner in Europe while her father was U. S. Minister to Greece, a long-time resident of Cuba, and, during the period in which I made her acquaintance, a teacher in New Orleans. In an old letter to one of my children I find: “Mrs. Waugh makes much of your mother. She is happier for having known me. I have been helped by her to some knowledge from the vast store-house which may never be taken account of—still I here make the acknowledgment.”
Frances Willard said of her, “She is rarely gifted, and I enjoy her thought—so different from my own practical life. She is a seer (see-er)!”
Her wide acquaintance with remarkable people invested her with rare interest. In one of her many letters to me, dated in 1873, she says with fine catholicity of spirit and exceptional insight: “I think the so-called religious world lays too much stress on the infidelity of such men as Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer. They have not reached the point in their spiritual growth where knowledge opens the domain of real, pure worship; they are in a transition period, are still groping about in a world of effects, living in a world of results of which they have not yet found the cause. Spencer has given the most masterly exposition of the nervous system which has yet been made. The next step would have been into the domain of the spiritual. Here he stopped, because his mind has not yet reached the degree of development in which the utterances of truth perceived becomes the highest duty. When he shall have rounded and brought up all of his studies to a point equally advanced with his Psychology then he will be obliged to say, ‘My God and my Lord!’ I hope he may soon, as Longfellow said, ‘Touch God’s right hand in the darkness.’”
Science—and the Church—did not long have to wait for the Wallace and Henry Drummond of Mrs. Waugh’s intuition.