She had already, in 1880, begun the task of
selection from the great accumulation of letters and papers relating
to her life, and writes thus to her son in Saco, Maine, regarding the
work:--
_September_ 30, 1880.
MY DEAR CHARLEY,--My mind has been with you a great deal lately. I
have been looking over and arranging my papers with a view to sifting
out those that are not worth keeping, and so filing and arranging
those that are to be kept, that my heirs and assigns may with the less
trouble know where and what they are. I cannot describe (to you) the
peculiar feelings which this review occasions. Reading old letters--
when so many of the writers are gone from earth, seems to me like
going into the world of spirits--letters full of the warm, eager,
anxious, busy life, that is _forever_ past. My own letters, too,
full of by-gone scenes in my early life and the childish days of my
children. It is affecting to me to recall things that strongly moved
me years ago, that filled my thoughts and made me anxious when the
occasion and emotion have wholly vanished from my mind. But I thank
God there is _one_ thing running through all of them from the
time I was thirteen years old, and that is the intense unwavering
sense of Christ's educating, guiding presence and care. It is
_all_ that remains now. The romance of my youth is faded, it
looks to me now, from my years, so _very_ young--those days when
my mind only lived in _emotion_, and when my letters never were
dated, because they were only histories of the _internal_, but
now that I am no more and never can be young in this world, now that
the friends of those days are almost all in eternity, what remains?
Through life and through death, through sorrowing, through sinning,
Christ shall suffice me as he hath sufficed.
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