All night long he sat beside the form of his beloved Rachel, often feeling of her heart and pulse. In the morning he was wholly inconsolable, and when he found that she was really dead the body could scarcely be forced from his arms. He prepared a tomb for her like an open summer-house, and buried her under the white dome supported by marble pillars.
While Jackson lived he wore her miniature constantly about his neck, and every night laid it open beside her prayer-book at his bedside. Her face was the last thing upon which his eyes rested before he slept, and the first thing upon which his eyes opened in the morning, through those eight years at the White House. He made his will bequeathing all his property to his adopted son, because, said he, “If she were alive she would wish him to have it all, and to me her wish is law.”
Two days before he died he said, “Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not find my wife there.” He used to say, “All I have achieved—fame, power, everything—would I exchange, if she could be restored to me for a moment.”
Washington Irving cherished forever the memory of Matilda Hoffman, who died at the age of seventeen. He could never hear her name mentioned afterward. After his death a package was found marked “Private Mems.” In a faded manuscript of his own writing were a lovely miniature of Matilda and a braid of fair hair. For years Irving kept her Bible and prayer-book under his pillow, and to the end of his life these were always carried with him on his journeys.
In the faded manuscript one reads:
“The ills that I have undergone in this life have been dealt out to me drop by drop, and I have tasted all their bitterness. I saw her fade rapidly away: beautiful and more beautiful, and most angelical to the last.
“I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me. I abandoned all thought of the law. I went into the country, but could not bear the solitude, yet could not endure society.... I seemed to drift about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would continually recur to what it had lost; and whenever there was a pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement I would sink into dismal dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually before me, and I dreamed of her incessantly.”
“For time makes all but true love old;
The burning thoughts that then were told
Run molten still in memory’s mould,
And will not cool
Until the heart itself is cold
In Lethe’s pool.”