This text is part of:
[306] eloquent tribute to his old friend and anti-slavery coadjutor. He referred to the time when she accepted, with serene self-sacrifice, the obloquy which her Appeal had brought upon her, and noted, as one of the many ways in which popular hatred was manifested, the withdrawal from her of the privileges of the Boston Athenaeum. Her pallbearers were elderly, plain farmers in the neighborhood; and, led by the old white-haired undertaker, the procession wound its way to the not distant burial-ground, over the red and gold of fallen leaves, and under the half-clouded October sky. A lover of all beautiful things, she was, as her intimate friends knew, always delighted by the sight of rainbows, and used to so arrange prismatic glasses as to throw the colors on the walls of her room. Just after her body was consigned to the earth, a magnificent rainbow spanned with its arc of glory the eastern sky.1
1 The incident at her burial is alluded to in a sonnet written by William P. Andrews:—
Freedom! she knew thy summons, and obeyed
That clarion voice as yet scarce heard of men;
Gladly she joined thy red-cross service when
Honor and wealth must at thy feet be laid:
Onward with faith undaunted, undismayed
By threat or scorn, she toiled with hand and brain
To make thy cause triumphant, till the chain
Lay broken, and for her the freedmen prayed.
Nor yet she faltered; in her tender care
She took us all; and wheresoe'er she went,
Blessings, and Faith, and Beauty followed there,
E'en to the end, where she lay down content;
And with the gold light of a life more fair,
Twin bows of promise o'er her grave were blent.
Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.