There is this consolation: she can never suffer more; never feel again the chill of death; never part again from those she loves. Her heart can break no more. She has shed her last tear, and upon her stainless brow has been set the wondrous seal of everlasting peace.
When the Angel of Death—the masked and voiceless—enters the door of home, there come with her all the daughters of Compassion, and of these Love and Hope remain forever.
You are about to take this dear dust home—to the home of her girlhood, and to the place that was once my home. You will lay her with neighbors whom I have loved, and who are now at rest. You will lay her where my father sleeps.
"Lay her i' the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring."
I never knew, I never met, a braver spirit than the one that once inhabited this silent form of dreamless clay.
A TRIBUTE TO HENRY WARD BEECHER.
New York, June 26,1887.
HENRY WARD BEECHER was born in a Puritan penitentiary, of which his father was one of the wardens—a prison with very narrow and closely-grated windows. Under its walls were the rayless, hopeless and measureless dungeons of the damned, and on its roof fell the shadow of God's eternal frown. In this prison the creed and catechism were primers for children, and from a pure sense of duty their loving hearts were stained and scarred with the religion of John Calvin.