Famous leaders among men

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

After Lyman Beecher had prayed, "she fell into a sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a moving scene to see eight little children weeping around the bed of a dying mother."

"They told us," says Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "at one time that she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven. Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister Catherine's window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly head, with great simplicity he answered, 'Why, I am going to heaven to find ma!'"

The benign influence of this lovely mother was never forgotten by Henry Ward Beecher. He said: "I have only such a remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago, faint, evanescent, and yet, caught by imagination and fed by that which I have heard of her, and by what my father's thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember.... Do you know why so often I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her....

"She has been part and parcel of my upper life—a star whose parallax I could not take, but nevertheless, shining from afar, she has been the light that lit me easier into the thought of the invisible and the presence of the Divine."

Again her distinguished son wrote: "There are few born into this world that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in God."

When Henry Ward was eighteen, he found some letters of his mother to his father. He wrote in his diary: "O my mother! I could not help kissing the letters. I looked at the paper and thought that her hand had rested upon it while writing it. The hand of my mother! She had formed every letter which I saw. She had looked upon that paper which I now looked upon. She had folded it. She had sent it."

The Rev. Lyman Beecher said of her, "I never heard a murmur, ... I never witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it."

Henry Ward repeats this incident told him by his father: "One day, being much annoyed by some hogs that kept getting into his garden, he seized his gun and rushed to the door. My mother anxiously followed, and cried, 'O father, don't shoot the poor things!' He flashed back at her, 'Woman, go into the house!' and when he was telling me of it years afterwards he said: 'Without a word or look she turned, quietly, majestically, and went in—but she didn't get in before I did. I threw my arms around her in an agony of self-reproach, and cried "Forgive me, oh, forgive me!" She uttered no word, but she looked at me like a queen—and smiled—and kissed my face; my passion was gone, and my offence forgiven.' Up to the last of his life he never spoke of her but with intensest admiration and loving remembrance."

About a year after Roxana's death, Dr. Lyman Beecher found an estimable woman willing to be a mother to the eight motherless children, and to take summer boarders to help support the family, whose income was eight hundred dollars a year. She must have been a woman of great self-sacrifice.

Young Henry thought her saintly, but cold. "Although I was longing to love somebody," he writes, "she did not call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who was very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving. I revered her, but I was not attracted to her.... I knew that about twilight she prayed; and I had a great shrinking from going past her door at the time. I had not the slightest doubt that she had set her affections on things above, and not on things beneath."