The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss

by George Lewis Prentiss

Second, she was unconventional. Her writings were not religious in any stereotyped, popular sense. Her characters were not stenciled. The holiest of them were strongly and often amusingly individualized. She did not try to make automatons to repeat religious commonplaces, but actual men and women, through whose very peculiarities the Holy Spirit revealed His presence and work.

Third, I have already referred to her sprightliness. She had naturally a keen sense of humor which overflowed both in her conversation and in her books. She saw nothing in the nature of the faith she professed which bade her lay violent hands on this propensity; and she once said that if her religion could not stand her saying a funny thing now and then it was not worth much. But, whatever she might say or write of this character, one never felt that it betrayed any irreverent lightness of spirit. The undertone of her life was so deeply reverential, so thoroughly pervaded with adoring love for Christ, that it made itself felt through all her lighter moods, like the ground-swell of the sea through the sparkling ripples on the surface.

Fourth, her style was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid fancy which made even the region of fable tributary to the service of truth.

Fifth, her books were intensely personal; expressions, I mean, of her own experience. Many of her characters and scenes are simple transcripts of fact, and much of what she taught in song, was a repetition of what she had learned in suffering.

To go back once more to her office of consoler. She exercised this not only through her books, but also through her personal ministries in those large and widening circles which centred in her literary and pastoral life. Those who were favored with her friendship in times of sorrow found her a comforter indeed. Her letters, of which, at such times, she was prodigal, were to many sore hearts as leaves from the tree of life. She did not expect too much of a sufferer. She recognized human weakness as well as divine strength. But in all her attempts at consolation, side by side with her deep and true sympathy, went the lesson of the harvest of sorrow. She was always pointing the mourner past the floods, to the high place above them—teaching him to sing even amid the waves and billows—"the Lord will command His loving-kindness"; "I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance." "I knew," she wrote to a bereaved friend, "that God would never afflict you so, if He had not something beautiful and blissful to give in place of what He took." The insight which her writings revealed into many and subtle aspects of sorrow, made her the recipient of hosts of letters from strangers, opening to her their griefs, and asking her counsel; and to all she gave freely and joyfully as far as her strength and time and judgment would allow. There was a tonic vein mingling with her comforts. Her touch was firm as well as tender. She knew the shoals of morbid sentimentality which skirt the deeps of trouble, and sought to pilot the sorrowing past the shoals to the shore.

And now, having thus spoken of her preparation for God's work, the work itself, and its fruits, how can we gather up and depict the many personal traits and associations which crowd upon the memory? Of such things how many are incapable of reproduction, their fine flavor vanishing with the moment. How often that which most commends them to remembrance lies in the glance of an eye, an inflection of the voice, an expression of the face, which neither pen nor pencil can put on record.

How many such recollections, for example, group themselves round that beautiful home among the hills. How it bore her mark and was pervaded with her presence, and seemed, more than any other spot, the appropriate setting of her life. Now she was at her chamber window studying the ever shifting lights and shadows on the hills; now rambling over the fields and through the woods and returning with her hands laden with flowers and grasses; now busy with her ferns in her garden; again beguiling the hours with her pencil, or stealing away to develop some happy fancy or fresh thought on which her mind had been working for days. And how pleasant her talk. How she would dart off sometimes from the line of the gravest theme into some quaint, mirth-provoking conceit. How many odd things she had seen; of how many strange adventures she had partaken, and how graphically and charmingly she told them. With what relish she would bring forth some good thing saved up to tell to one who would appreciate it; yet, on the other hand, how earnestly, how intelligently, with what simplicity, with what eager delight would she pursue the discussion of the deep things of God. Nor was her home merely a place of rest and retirement. Its doors were ever wide open to congenial spirits, and also to some of Christ's poor, to whom the healing breath of the mountains and the rare sights and sounds of country life were as gifts from heaven. In that little community she was not content to be a mere summer idler. There, too, she pursued her ministry of comfort and of instruction. Eternity alone will reveal the fruitage of the seeds she sowed in her weekly Bible-reading, to which the women came for miles over the mountain roads, through storm and through sunshine.

And here the end came. Death, if a surprise at all to her, could only be a pleasant surprise. In one of her stories an old family servant says of her departed mistress: "Often's the time I've heard her talk about dying, and I mind a time when she thought she was going, and there was a light in her eye, and it was just as she looked when she said, 'Mary, I'm going to be married.'" It was a leaf out of her own life. She had marked in one of her books of devotion a passage which, I imagine, summed up her view of the whole matter: "A true Christian is neither fond of life nor weary of it." She had no sentimental disgust with life, but her overmastering desire was to see and be like her Lord, and death was the entrance gate to that perfect vision. Only the opening of that portal could bring the full answer to her prayer of years, "I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory." In this attitude the messenger found her. I will not dwell on the closing scenes…. It is pleasanter to turn from that long, weary Sabbath, when nature in its perfect beauty and repose seemed to mock the bitter agony of the death-chamber, to the hour when, with the first full brightness of the morning, the silver cord was loosed, and she was present with the Lord. Surely it was something more than an accidental coincidence that, in the little "Daily Food," which for nearly forty years had been her closet companion, the passage for the 13th of August was: "I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." That summer afternoon when she was laid to rest had a brightness which was not all of the glories of the setting sun, as he burst forth from the encircling clouds, and touched with his parting splendor the gates of the grave. Nature, with its fulness of summer life, was set in the key of the resurrection by the assurance of her victory over death, and it was with a new and mighty sense of their truth that we spoke over her ashes the words of the Apostle: "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

So now, as then, more even than then, since these months have given us time to study the lesson of that life and the sources of its power, we give thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord; thanks for the divine processes which moulded a daughter of consolation; thanks for the fountains of comfort opened by her along life's highways and which continue to flow while she sleeps in Jesus; thanks for a good and fruitful life ended "in the communion of the Holy Catholic Church, in the confidence of a certain faith, in the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope, in charity with all mankind, and in peace with God."

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