Centreville, July 27.
Will and I have been talking over the good fellows who have
gone before in this war, — fellows whom Rob loved so much, many of them: there
is none who has been so widely and so dearly loved as he. What comfort it is to
think of this, — if “life is but a sum of love,” Rob had had his share, and had
done his share.
When I think how Rob's usefulness had latterly been
increasing, how the beauty of his character had been becoming a power, widely
felt, how his life had become something more than a promise, I feel as if his
father's loss were the heaviest: sometime perhaps we can make him feel that he
has other sons, but now remember that in a man's grief for a son whose manhood
had just opened, as Rob's had, there is something different from what any
woman's grief can be.
That is the time to die when one is happiest, or rather I mean
that is the time when we wish those we love to die: Rob was very happy too at
the head of his regiment where he died: it is pleasant to remember that he
never regretted the old Second for a moment.
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 286-7
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