"My health," she wrote at that time, "is not very strong, and I may have to give up before long. I may have to yield on account of my voice, which I think, has become somewhat affected. I might be so glad if it was only so that I could go home among my own kindred and people, but slavery comes up like a dark shadow between me and the home of my childhood. Well, perhaps it is my lot to die from home and be buried among strangers; and yet I do not regret that I have espoused this cause; perhaps I have been of some service to the cause of human rights, and I hope the consciousness that I have not lived in vain, will be a halo of peace around my dying bed; a heavenly sunshine lighting up the dark valley and shadow of death."
Notwithstanding this yearning for home, she was far from desiring at her death, a burial in a Slave State, as the following clearly expressed views show:
"I have lived in the midst of oppression and wrong, and I am saddened by every captured fugitive in the North; a blow has been struck at my freedom, in every hunted and down-trodden slave in the South; North and South have both been guilty, and they that sin must suffer."
Also, in harmony with the above sentiments, came a number of verses appropriate to her desires in this respect, one of which we here give as a sample:
"Make me a grave where'er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill,
Make it among earth's humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves."
In the State of Maine the papers brought to her notice the capture of Margaret Garner, and the tragic and bloody deed connected therewith. And she writes:
"Rome had her altars where the trembling criminal, and the worn and weary slave might fly for an asylum—Judea her cities of refuge; but Ohio, with her Bibles and churches, her baptisms and prayers, had not one temple so dedicated to human rights, one altar so consecrated to human liberty, that trampled upon and down-trodden innocence knew that it could find protection for a night, or shelter for a day."
In the fall of 1860, in the city of Cincinnati, Mrs. Harper was married to Fenton Harper, a widower, and resident of Ohio. It seemed obvious that this change would necessarily take her from the sphere of her former usefulness. The means she had saved from the sale of her books and from her lectures, she invested in a small farm near Columbus, and in a short time after her marriage she entered upon house-keeping.
Notwithstanding her family cares, consequent upon married life, she only ceased from her literary and anti-slavery labors, when compelled to do so by other duties.