The Mormons outside Nauvoo were indeed hard pressed, but inside the city they maintained themselves very well for two or three months longer.  Strange to say, the chief part of this respite was devoted to completing the structure of their quaintly devised but beautiful temple.  Since the dispersion of Jewry, probably, history affords us no parallel to the attachment of the Mormons for this edifice.  Every architectural element, every most fantastic emblem it embodied, was associated, for them, with some cherished feature of their religion.  Its erection had been enjoined upon them as a most sacred duty:  they were proud of the honor it conferred upon their city, when it grew up in its splendor to become the chief object of the admiration of strangers upon the upper Mississippi.  Besides, they had built it as a labor of love; they could count up to half a million the value of their tithings and freewill offerings laid upon it.  Hardly a Mormon woman had not given up to it some trinket or pin-money; the poorest Mormon man had at least served the tenth part of his year on its walls; and the coarsest artisan could turn to it with something of the ennobling attachment an artist has for his own creation.

Therefore, though their enemies drove on them ruthlessly, they succeeded in parrying the last sword-thrust, till they had completed even the gilding of the angel and trumpet on the summit of its lofty spire.  As a closing work, they placed on the entablature of the front, like a baptismal mark on the forehead, these words: 

  THE HOUSE OF THE LORD: 

  BUILT BY THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS.

  HOLINESS TO THE LORD!

Then, at high noon, under the bright sunshine of May, the next after its completion, they consecrated it to divine service.  There was a carefully studied ceremonial for the occasion.  It was said the high elders of the sect travelled furtively from the camp of Israel in the wilderness, and, throwing off ingenious disguises, appeared in their own robes of office to give it splendor.

For that one day the temple stood resplendent in all its typical glories of sun, moon and stars, and other abounding figured and lettered signs, hieroglyphs, and symbols; but that day only.  The sacred rites of consecration ended, the work of removing the sacrosancta proceeded with the rapidity of magic.  It went on through the night, and when the morning of the next day dawned all the ornaments and furniture, everything that could provoke a sneer, had been carried off; and except some fixtures that would not bear removal, the building was dismantled.

This day saw the departure of the last of the elders, and the largest band that moved in one company together.  The people of Iowa have told me that from morning to night they passed westward like an endless procession.  They did not seem greatly out of heart, they said; but, at the top of every hill, before they disappeared, they were to be seen looking back, like banished Moors, on their abandoned homes and the distant temple and its glittering spire.