“I wrote the foregoing, dear Frederic, more than two weeks ago, and now, I must say farewell to you, for my hours are indeed few. I think I may not see another morning on earth. I have of late suffered much about midnight, from extreme difficulty of breathing, and something tells me that I shall not survive another such season. But I am not dismayed—God is yet with me in his sustaining Spirit, and I fear no evil.
“And now, my husband, before I go, let me thank and bless you for all your tenderness and patience toward me, in the years gone by. And oh, let me implore you not to sorrow too bitterly when I am dead. We have been very happy in one another’s love, and in our children—our children still left to you. Can you not say ‘blessed be the name of the Lord?’
“I enclose with this my hair, just severed from my head. I remember to have often heard you say that you might never have loved me but for this happy attraction—my one beauty. I desired my sister to cut it for you, and she tried to do so, but the scissors fell from her hand, and she went out, sobbing bitterly. Then I looked around with a troubled expression, I suppose, on our Frederic—he understood it, came at once to my side, and calmly, though with some tears, cut from the head of his dying mother this sad legacy for his poor absent father. Is he not a noble boy?
“I will not say to you farewell for ever, for I know your living faith in God, who will bring us home, where there shall be ‘no more pain, nor sorrow, nor crying.’ And, Frederic, if it be permitted, I will see you once more, even here. To me it seems that my love would find you, wherever you might be in the wide universe of God, and that my freed spirit would seek you first—over the deep, through night and tempest, cleaving its way to your side. But as heaven willeth, it shall be.
“And now, farewell! best and dearest, farewell! My beloved, my beloved! Oh, that I could compress into human words the divine measure of the love which glows and yearns in my heart, at this hour. That love the frost of death cannot chill, the night of the grave cannot quench. It is bound up with the immortal life of my soul—it shall live for thee in the heavens, and be thy eternal possession there.
“May God comfort thee in thy loneliness, my love, my husband. Again, again farewell!
“Again, again farewell!
Now indeed the bitterness of death is past.
And yet, once more, farewell!
Thy Dora.”