DEAR SIR,—I took
leave of Marshfield yesterday, not with out regret. The trees were leafless,
but the fields were green, and the sea was calm as summer.
Among the things
which detained me, was the seeing to the completion of a vault or tomb, for the
deposit of me and mine.
I have lost one wife
and three children. Their remains are now under a church in this city, which
the progress of change is very likely ere long to remove.
At Marshfield, by my
own land, on the margin of the upland, is a spot on which a party of pilgrims
from Plymouth, erected a church, in the very earliest period of the colony; and
here is the ancient burial-ground. It is quiet, and secure against change, and
not far from my house.
To this spot I shall
be taken not many years hence, and those loved ones, whose spirits have gone
before me to another world, will be gathered around me.
I dwell on these
things without pain. I love to see a cheerful old age; but there is nothing I
should dread more than a thoughtless, careless, obtuse mind, near the end of
life. Of course, it makes no difference in our future state, on which spot we
mingle again with our parent earth; but it sobers the mind, I think, and leads
us to salutary reflections, to contemplate our last resting-place.
SOURCE: Fletcher
Webster, Editor, The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, Vol.
2, p. 402-3
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