“You say I left him too soon to know him well, but it was not so.  I had spiritual sight of the child, and knew his capacities.  I hoped to be of use to him if he lived, for sweet was our communion beside the murmuring river, and when he imitated the low voices of the little brook, or telling him stories in my room, which even then he well understood.  A thousand times I have thought of the time when he first said the word Open to get into my room, and my heart always was open to him.  He was my consolation in hours sadder than you ever guessed—­my spring-flower, my cheerful lark.  None but his parents could love him so well; no child, except little Waldo Emerson, had I ever so loved.  In both I saw the promise of a great future:  its realization is deferred to some other sphere; ere long may we follow and aid it there.

“Ever sacred, my friend, be this bond between us—­the love and knowledge of the child.  I was his aunty; and no sister can so feel what you lose.  My friend, I have never wept so for grief of my own, as now for yours.  It seems to me too cruel; you are resigned; you make holy profit of it; the spear has entered and forced out the heart’s blood, the pure ichor follows.  I know not yet how to feel so; I have not yet grieved away the bitter pang.

“My mother wrote me he said sometimes he would get a boat and carry yellow flowers to his Aunty Margaret.  I suppose he had not yet quite forgotten that I used to get such for him.  I often thought what I should carry him from Europe—­what I should tell him—­what teach?  He had a heart of natural poetry; he would have prized all that was best.

“Oh, it is all over; and indeed this life is over for me.  The conditions of this planet are not propitious to the lovely, the just, the pure; it is these that go away; it is the unjust that triumph.  Let us, as you say, purify ourselves; let us labor in the good spirit here, but leave all thought of results to Eternity.

“I say this, and yet my heart is bound to earth as never before; for I, too, have a dearer self—­a little son.  He is now about the age sweet Pickie was when I was with him most; and I have thought much of the one in the dawning graces of the other.  But I accept the lesson, and will strive to prepare myself to resign him.  Indeed, I had the warning before; for, during the siege of Rome, when I could not see him, my mind, agonized by the danger of his father, as well as all the overpowering and infamous injuries heaped upon the noble, sought refuge in the thought of him safe, in his green nook, and, as I thought, in care of worthy persons.  When at last we left, our dearest friends laid low, our fortunes finally ruined, and every hope for which we struggled, blighted, I hoped to find comfort in his smiles.  I found him wasted to a skeleton; and it is only by a month of daily and hourly most anxious care (in which I was often assisted by memories of what Mrs. Greeley did for Pickie) that I have been able to restore him.  But I hold him by a frail tenure; he has the tendency to cough by which I was brought so low.