The loss of the boy, whom the father had
"named admiringly, gratefully, reverently," Charles Pollen, was a
terrible blow to the reformer, and a life-long grief to the mother. He
seemed to have been a singularly beautiful, winning, and affectionate
little man and to have inspired sweet hopes of future "usefulness and
excellence" in the breasts of his parents. "He seemed born to take a
century on his shoulders, without stooping; his eyes were large,
lustrous, and charged with electric light; his voice was clear as a
bugle, melodious, and ever ringing in our ears, from the dawn of day to
the ushering in of night, so that since it has been stilled, our
dwelling has seemed to be almost without an occupant," lamented the
stricken father to Elizabeth Pease, of Darlington, England.
"Death itself to me is not terrible, is not repulsive," poured the
heartbroken pioneer into the ears of his English friend, "is not to be
deplored. I see in it as clear an evidence of Divine wisdom and
beneficence as I do in the birth of a child, in the works of creation,
in all the arrangements and operations of nature. I neither fear nor
regret its power. I neither expect nor supplicate to be exempted from
its legitimate action. It is not to be chronicled among calamities; it
is not to be styled "a mysterious dispensation of Divine Providence"; it
is scarcely rational to talk of being resigned to it.
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