Comfort came down the dying wretch to raise,
And his last faltering accents whispered praise.”
Worn with these labors, the gentle, patient lover of God and of his brother, sank at last overwearied, and passed peacefully away to a world where all are lovely and loving.
Though his correspondence with her he most loved was interrupted, from his unwillingness to subject his letters to the surveillance of the warden, yet a note reached her, conveyed through the hands of a prisoner whose time was out. In this letter, the last which any earthly friend ever received, he says:
I ofttimes, yea, all times, think of thee;—if I did not, I should cease to exist.
What must that system be which makes it necessary to imprison with convicted felons a man like this, because he loves his brother man “not wisely but too well”?
On his death Whittier wrote the following:
“Si crucem libenter portes, te portabit.”—Imit. Christ.
“The Cross, if freely borne, shall be
No burthen, but support, to thee.”