Frances E. Willard; A Memorial Volume

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 Excerpt: ...that has gone through sorrow, through fire, through the flood, through the thunder of life's battle, ripening, sweetening, enlarging and growing finer and finer and gentler and gentler, that fineness and gentleness being the result of great strength and great knowledge accumulated through a long life--let me see such a one stand at the end of life, as the sun stands on a summer afternoon just before it goes down. Is there anything on earth so beautiful as a rich, ripe, large, growing and glorious Christian heart? No, there is nothing." It was the going from life of such a mother that made earth empty and the heart of the daughter forever bereaved. Ever after her spirit drooped; a part of Miss Willard's deeper spiritual self reached out toward that universe to which from the moment of her mother's departure she felt she too belonged. In her journal we find the ever-recurring eloquent question, "Where is my mother?" A question that was to persistently reiterate itself until like a tired child she had been restored to her mother's arms. Not otherwise than Monica and Saint Augustine did these two, Saint Courageous and her daughter Frances, sit in the open window and gaze into the open sky into which the mother was soon to take her flight: they saw the heavens open and those who once had dwelt within their home, standing by the throne of God. If in the supreme hour of entrance upon the life with God the mother ascending sent benediction down upon her daughter and upon all the world, the daughter gazing into the open sky cried out, "I give thee joy, my mother! All hail, but not farewell. Our faces are set the same way, blessed mother: I shall follow after--it will not be long." CHAPTER XI IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY "The many make the hous...