Not by the death that kills the body.  Nay,
  By that which even Christ bade us to fear
  Hath died my dead. 
                    Ah, me! if on a bier
  I could but see him lifeless stretched to-day,
  I ’d bathe his face with tears of joy, and lay
  My cheek to his in anguish which were near
  To ecstasy, if I could hold him dear
  In death as life.  Mere separations weigh
  As dust in balances of love.  The death
  That kills comes only by dishonor.  Vain
  To chide me! vain!  And weaker to implore,
  O thou once loved so well, loved now no more! 
  There is no resurrection for such slain,
  No miracle of God could give thee breath!

* * * * *

Mercy Philbrick lived thirty years after the events described in these pages.  It was a life rich to overflowing, yet uneventful, as the world reckons:  a life lonely, yet full of companionship; sady yet full of cheer; hard, and yet perpetually uplifted by an inward joy which made her very presence like sunshine, and made men often say of her, “Oh, she has never known sorrow.”  This was largely the result of her unquenchable gift of song, of the true poet’s temperament, to which life is for ever new, beautiful, and glad.  It was also the result of her ever-increasing spirituality of nature.  This took no shape of creed, worship, or what the world’s common consent calls religion.  Most of the words spoken by the teachers of churches repelled Mercy by their monotonous iteration of the letter which killeth.  But her realization of the solemn significance of the great fact of being alive deepened every hour; her tenderness, her sense of brotherhood to every human being, and her sense of the actual presence and near love of God.  Her old intolerance was softened, or rather it had changed from antagonisms on the surface to living principles at the core.  Truth, truth, truth, was still the war-cry of her soul; and there was an intensity in every word of her written or spoken pleadings on this subject which might well have revealed to a careful analyzer of them that they had sprung out of the depths of the profoundest experiences.  Her influence as a writer was very great.  As she grew older, she wrote less and less for the delight of the ear, more and more for the stirring of the heart.  To do a little towards making people glad, towards making them kind to one another, towards opening their eyes to the omnipresent beauty,—­these were her ambitions.  “Oh, the tender, unutterable beauty of all created things!” were the opening lines of one of her sweetest songs; and it might have been said to be one of the watchwords of her life.