“The things we see are but fractions of that which we see not. We never saw the soul to whose visible form we bid farewell for a time to-day. We saw but its mask, its clay image. That which made its impress upon us was the spirit. By means of what it said and did, by the flash of kindness in the eye, by the pressure of the hand in sympathy, by all the means great and small by which it expressed its good will and love to others, it revealed itself. These are what we shall remember and cherish.
“Life is not all ‘a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.’ It is an endless becoming.
“Let us work by every means in our power to educate the individual, to develop the unit, the imperishable, never-dying unit, for this is the secret of all improvement, all growth, all happiness. Only by growth out of ignorance into knowledge can we come into our inheritance of eternal good.
“Nothing is great in this world and nothing is small. I cannot say of the soul whose transition we celebrate to-day that it was either, for there is no distinction. It aspired, and that means much. It strove to go up higher; and that striving will lift it into the fulness of light.
“That living, loving, truthful, beautiful spirit, has not gone back to the sea of universal Being to lose its identity. There is no going back. In that sea we live and move and have our being now, as well as in the future, yet we remain individuals. The union with the one mind toward which we are all moving is an harmonious ever-upward-tending life, not an extinction of the individual. The school, the club, the state are its prototypes here,—a blending of the many units in one body, but the extinction of none.
“We sorrow, but not without hope. Our friend still lives. We shall find her again.”
“I loved her,” said Gabriel Norris, as he sat with Lilla in the little flat after all was over. “To be near her I came to New York. She never knew; but now she knows. My love did not crave possession. I was happy in loving. I am still happy in it. She lives and I love her. It is enough.”
THE END.
Transcriber’s Notes
Errors in punctuation and spacing have been fixed.