Christ is the end and Christ the beginning,
The beginning and end of all is Christ.
I was passionate in my attachments in those far back years, and as I
have looked over files of old letters, they are all gone (except one,
C. Van Rensselaer), Georgiana May, Delia Bacon, Clarissa Treat,
Elisabeth Lyman, Sarah Colt, Elisabeth Phenix, Frances Strong,
Elisabeth Foster. I have letters from them all, but they have been
long in spirit land and know more about how it is there than I do. It
gives me a sort of dizzy feeling of the shortness of life and nearness
of eternity when I see how many that I have traveled with are gone
within the veil. Then there are all my own letters, written in the
first two years of marriage, when Mr. Stowe was in Europe and I was
looking forward to motherhood and preparing for it--my letters when my
whole life was within the four walls of my nursery, my thoughts
absorbed by the developing character of children who have now lived
their earthly life and gone to the eternal one,--my two little boys,
each in their way good and lovely, whom Christ has taken in youth, and
my little one, my first Charley, whom He took away before he knew sin
or sorrow,--then my brother George and sister Catherine, the one a
companion of my youth, the other the mother who assumed the care of me
after I left home in my twelfth year--and they are gone. Then my
blessed father, for many years so true an image of the Heavenly
Father,--in all my afflictions he was afflicted, in all my
perplexities he was a sure and safe counselor, and he too is gone
upward to join the angelic mother whom I scarcely knew in this world,
who has been to me only a spiritual presence through life.
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