Many testimonies to the character and worth of our child were written and published. They shall speak for her and for the greatness of our loss. The Times-Democrat said: “Wherever she moved she was by the necessities of her sweet nature a ‘bright, particular star’ among earth’s shining ones. Her conversation was a delight to all within sound of her voice. Her wit was gentle, pure, generous and sincere. She ruled all hearts, and loved to rule, for she ruled by love.”
Catharine Cole wrote: “Many men and women famous in the great world of art and literature will pay the sweet tribute of tears to the memory of this lovely woman; and here in our own home, where she was so beloved and admired, her gentle, cheery presence will be missed and mourned for many sad days. She shone like a jewel set amid dross.”
From Mrs. Mollie Moore Davis—widely known for her exquisitely delicate love poems and quaint tales of real life—came this tender word: “I truly appreciated her great gifts and greater loveliness. She is a star gone from my sky.”
Mrs. Mary Ashley Townsend sent me these words: “Her constant and determined intellectual development, her devotion to progress, her literary tastes, her social charms, her reliability as a friend, her loveliness as a wife and mother, formed a combination of qualities that made her the realization of the poet’s dream,
“‘Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.’”
Mrs. Townsend is herself a rarely gifted poet, long and deeply homed in the heart of New Orleans. With the exception of Longfellow and Cable, no writer has so vividly mirrored the very atmosphere of lower Louisiana. In “Down the Bayou” its “heroed past,” its shrined memories find an eloquent voice; there in everlasting tints are painted its dank luxuriance and verdant solitudes; its red-tiled roofs and stucco walls, the “mud-built towers of castled cray-fish,” its sluggish, sinuous bayoux and secrets of lily-laden lagoons, its odors of orange bloom and mossy swamps mingled with flute-toned song and flitting color amid the solemn, dark-hued live-oaks. Mary Ashley Townsend had three lovely daughters. One has passed over the river, but she still has Adele, who resembles her gifted mother, and Daisy, to comfort her life.
James R. Randall, the gifted author of “My Maryland,” said in his own newspaper: “She was too radiantly dowered for this world she glorified. She was all that poets have sung and men have wished daughter and wife to be. Well may the bereaved father and husband wonder with poor Lear ‘why so many mean things live while she has ceased to be.’” Other expressions were as follows: “It is something worth living for, to have been the mother of such a being.” “Outside of your mother-love the loss of the sweet friendship and congeniality of your lives will create an awful void. But that beautiful soul is yours still—growing and developing in Paradise.” “Amid all her charms what impressed me most was her admiration for her mother. She addressed you often and fondly as ‘dear,’ as if you were the child and she the mother.” “Centuries of experience have not developed a philosophy deeper or more comforting for the human race than that of David: ‘He shall not return to me but I shall go to him.’ I thank God for the great gift of death!”
A minister of God wrote me, from Worcester, Mass., a word that may be as great a light to some sitting in darkness as it was to me: “I must confess that, for my own part, I take such sorrows with less heaviness of heart than once, for the reason that every such loss seems to strengthen, rather than weaken, my faith in immortality. In good and beautiful lives I see so vividly a revelation of God—the Infinite Holiness and Beauty shining through the human soul and the raiment of clay—that I cannot believe it possible for death to extinguish their real life ‘hidden with Christ in God.’ I cannot believe that they can be ‘holden of the grave.’ I feel assured that theirs is a conscious life of progress and joy, and cannot mourn for them as dead, but only as far away. More and more am I convinced that this vivid feeling of the Divine Presence in beautiful human lives is peculiarly the Christian’s ground of hope in immortality. It was what the apostle meant by ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory,’ and it gives us gradually the clear vision of an immortal world. Only thus, as we gain that ‘knowledge of God’ which is ‘eternal life’ here and now, can we rise above the mist and smoke of this temporal world and lift our eyes ‘unto the hills whence cometh our help.’ Only thus as we live in the eternal world, here and now, can we feel secure that nothing fair and good in human life can perish.”
Mrs. Hannah Whitehall Smith wrote me thus from Philadelphia the sad December of this year:
“My dear Friend: