How little did he dream, when penning these words, or did his friend dream while reading them, that, after the lapse of more than forty years, the “dear Elizabeth” would find her grave near by the old parsonage in which that wedding was to be celebrated, while the dust of the lovely daughter of Dorset would be sleeping on the distant shores of the Bosphorus!

[1] For many years after the publication of his Memoir, it was so often given to children at their baptism that at one time those who bore it, in and out of New England, were to be numbered by hundreds, if not thousands.  “I once saw the deaths of three little Edward Paysons in one paper,” wrote Mrs. Prentiss in 1832.

[2] He was the author of a curious work entitled, “Proofs of the real Existence, and dangerous Tendency, of Illuminism.”  Charlestown, 1802.  By “Illuminism” he means an organised attempt, or conspiracy, to undermine the foundations of Christian society and establish upon its ruins the system of atheism.

[3] “I spent part of last evening reading over some old letters of my grandmother’s and never realised before what a remarkable woman she was both as to piety and talent.”—­From a letter of Mrs. Prentiss, written in 1864.

[4] In a letter to his mother,—­written when Elizabeth was three years old, he says:  “E. has a terrible abscess, which we feared would prove too much for her slender constitution.  We were almost worn out with watching; and, just as she began to mend, I was seized with a violent ague in my face, which gave me incessant anguish for six days and nights together, and deprived me almost entirely of sleep.  Three nights I did not close my eyes.  When well nigh distracted with pain and loss of sleep, Satan was let loose upon me, to buffet me, and I verily thought would have driven me to desperation and madness.”

[5] The late President Wayland.

[6] Prof.  Calvin E. Stowe, D.D.

[7] The late Rev. Absalom Peters, D.D.

[8]

I can see the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering’s Woods;
And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves
In quiet neighborhoods. 
And the verse of that sweet old song,
It flutters and murmurs still: 
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” 
—­LONGFELLOW’S My Lost Youth.

[9] “The Lament of the Last Peach” had been written by her a year before when in Brooklyn, and her friend’s brother had sent it to “The Knickerbocker,” the popular Magazine of that day.  Here it is: 

LAMENT OF THE LAST PEACH.

In solemn silence here I live,
A lone, deserted peach;
So high that none but birds and winds
My quiet bough can reach. 
And mournfully, and hopelessly,
I think upon the past;
Upon my dear departed friends,
And I, the last—­the last.