William Lawrence lived, loved and respected and transferred his earthly love to God, giving him his supreme affections, thus living to his honor and his glory while on earth, and meeting death with a calm resignation, sank peacefully down to slumber in the quiet grave.

All the actors in the little drama have sunk beneath the waves of death, (but three daughters and the son’s wife,) and the dust of ages is gathering upon them; but their influence still lives and speaks to the generations of men.

The master and the slave are there.  The father and the daughter, the husband and the wife, and the parents and the son are there, each one “to answer for himself for the deeds done in the body.”  Surely, “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Lines, Written on the Year 1852.

  Weary and sad I sit alone,
    The storm-god whistles shrill and high,
  And piles of sombre clouds are thrown
    O’er the blue curtains of the sky.

  Mournful I sit, for one by one
    Time’s golden sands are ebbing fast;
  Whispering in low sepulchral tones,
    The next, perchance, may be the last.

  ’Tis midnight’s deep and solemn hour,
    When visionary forms appear,
  And shed their strange, mysterious power
    O’er the departure of the year.

  The charnel house is opened wide,
    And thither’s borne with brief adieu,
  And slumbering eyes laid beside
    Eighteen hundred fifty-two.

  Now memory wakes her silent string,
    And holds her umpire in the brain;
  And brings as she alone can bring,
    The image of the past again.

  Her golden key, with using bright,
    Unlocks the chambers of the soul,
  And holds to reason’s steady light
    The secret records of her scroll.

  Back, back she sails, down time’s dark stream,
    To childhood’s bright and sunny hours;
  And paints again her fairy dream,
    Her sports, her fancies, and her flowers.

  Touched by her wand, the sleeping dead
    Spring up to active life again: 
  And in the busy pathway tread,
    Mingling in our joy and pain.

  She points where many a hope sprang bright,
    And plum’d a while her pinions gay: 
  Then sank in disappointment’s night,
    And each fair promise died away.

  And as I scan her records of the past,
    And in succession all their deeds appear,
  There’s none o’er which so deep a shade is cast
    As thine, thou just expiring year.

  Thy spring was green, and bright, and gay,
    And bloom’d as fair as Eden’s bow’rs. 
  But mil-dew in her sunbeams lay,
    And scorpions lurk’d among the flowers.

  For when all perfumed seemed thy breath,
    And all thy aspect sweet and mild,
  It brought contagion, blight and death,
    And from us bore a lovely child,