Carleton sat down in his study room to write. He soon called his wife, complaining of a distressing pain in his stomach. He was advised to go to bed, and did so. The physician, Dr. A. L. Kennedy, was sent for. "How is your head?" asked Doctor Kennedy.
"If it were not for this pain, I should get up and write," answered Carleton.
With the consent of the physician he rose from the couch and walked the room for awhile for relief. Then returning, as he was about to lie down again, he fell over. Quickly unconscious, he passed away. Science would call the immediate cause of death apoplexy.
Thus died at his post, as he would have wished, the great war correspondent, traveller, author, statesman, and friend of man and God. He had lived nearly three years beyond the allotted period of three score and ten.
Two days later, while the flag over the public schoolhouse in Brookline drooped at half-mast, and Carleton's picture was wreathed with laurels, at the request of the scholars themselves, in the impressive auditorium of Shawmut Church, Carleton's body lay amid palms and lilies in the space fronting the pulpit. At his head and at his feet stood a veteran-sentinel from the John A. Andrew Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. These were relieved every quarter of an hour, during the exercises, by comrades who had been detailed for a service which they were proud to render to one who had so well told their story and honored them so highly. It was entirely a voluntary offering on the part of the veterans to pay this tribute of regard, which was as touching as it was unostentatious.
Nowhere in the church edifice were there any of the usual insignia of woe. The dirge was at first played to express the universal grief in the music of the organ, but it soon melted into In Memoriam and hymns of triumph. The quartet sang "Jesus Reigns," a favorite hymn of Carleton's, to music which he had himself composed only two years before.
It reminded me of the burst of melody which, from the belfry of the church in a Moravian town, announces the soul's farewell to earth and birth into heaven.
In the audience which filled the pews downstairs were men and women eminent in every walk of life, representatives of clubs, societies, and organizations. Probably without a single exception, all were sincere mourners, while yet rejoicing in a life so nobly rounded out. In the pulpit sat two of the pastors of Shawmut Church, and Dr. Arthur Little, friend of Carleton's boyhood, and a near relative. The eulogies were discriminating.
The addresses, with the prayers offered and the tributes made in script or print, with some letters of condolence received by Mrs. Coffin, and a remarkable interesting biographical sketch from The Congregationalist, by Rev. Howard A. Bridgman, have been gathered in a pamphlet published by George H. Wright, Harcourt Street, Boston.
From this pamphlet we extract the following: