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We cannot emulate your ceaseless good works; but we can follow, and we can love and remember.’
Mrs. Mary E. Stearns, of Medford, Massachusetts, wrote as follows to Rosalie Hopper: ‘The Telegraph has announced that the precious life you were all so anxiously watching has “passed on,” and that mysterious change we call death has taken it from your midst forever.
It is such a beautiful day!
The air is so soft, the grass so green, and the birds singing so joyously!
The day and the event have become so interwoven with each other, that I cannot separate them.
I think of his placid face, sleeping its last still sleep; and through the open window, I see the springing grass and the bursting buds.
My ears are filled with bird-music, and all other sounds are hushed in this Sabbath stillness.
All I see and hear seems to be hallowed by his departed spirit.
Ah, it is good to think of his death in the Spring time!
It is good that his soul, so fresh, so young and hopeful, should burst into a higher and more glorious life, as if in sympathy with the ever beautiful, ever wonderful resurrection of nature.
Dear, blessed old man!
I shall never see his face again; but his memory will be as green as this springing grass, and we shall always think and talk of our little experience with him, as one of the golden things that can never pass away.’
Dr. Russ, his beloved co-laborer in the Prison Association,
Boston, J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; London; Low and Company, 1854.
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