The closing years of the reformer’s life were years of great bodily suffering.  A disease of the kidneys and a chronic catarrh of the head made steady inroads upon the resources of his constitution, made life at times a wheel on which he was racked with physical tortures, all of which he bore with the utmost fortitude and serenity of spirit.  “The longer I live, the longer I desire to live,” he wrote Samuel J. May, “and the more I see the desirableness of living; yet certainly not in this frail body, but just as it shall please the dear Father of us all.”  One by one he saw the little band of which he was leader dwindle as now one and now another dropped by the way.  And it was he or Mr. Phillips, or both, who spoke the last loving words over their coffins.  As the little band passed on to the unseen country, a new joy awoke in the soul of the leader left behind, the joy of anticipation, of glad reunion beyond the grave.  “How unspeakably pleasant it will be to greet them, and to be greeted by them on the other side of the line,” it seemed to him as he, too, began to descend toward the shore of the swift, silent river.  The deep, sweet love for his mother returned with youthful freshness and force to him, the man of seventy-three years, at the thought of coming again into her presence.  A strange yearning was tugging at his heart for all the dear ones gone before.  The fond mother, who had watched over his childhood, and the fond wife, who had been the stay of his manhood, were the first two whom he yearned to meet after crossing the river.  The joyous thought of his approaching meeting with those white-souled women cheered and comforted the reformer amid excruciating physical sufferings.  Worn out by heroic and Herculean labors for mankind and by a complication of diseases, he more and more longed for rest, to go home to beloved ones as he expressed it.  To the question, “What do you want, Mr. Garrison?” asked by the attending physician on the day before his death, he replied, weariedly, “To finish it up!” And this he did at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Henry Villard, in New York, in the midst of children and grandchildren, near midnight, on May 24, 1879.

“While that ear could listen,” said Wendell Phillips over the illustrious champion of liberty as he lay dead in the old church in Roxbury; “While that ear could listen, God gave what he has rarely given to man, the plaudits and prayers of four millions of victims.”  But as he lay there he had, besides, the plaudits and praise of an emancipated nation.  The plaudits and praise of an emancipated race, mingling melodiously with those of an emancipated nation made noble music about his bier.  In the city, where forty-three years before he was mobbed, the flags floated at half-mast in his honor; and on Beacon Hill, where the Government once desired his destruction, the voice of appreciation was heard and tokens of the State’s sorrow met the eye.  Great in life great also in death was William Lloyd Garrison.