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Your Brother Henry is as well as when you were here & your mother not sick. God grant the continuance of those Blessings with the addition of life, health, & happiness to yourself, & your dear & valuable brother at Kenebeck.2 Most affectionately subscribe in tears, your mother, while she fervantly wishes to say amen to the will of Heaven & ever to seal this desire of submission with the signature of M. Warren P.S. Your father has this fine morning for the first time within a fortnight been prevailed upon to mount his horse & ride: was he here he would have something to say to you but you know his paternal tenderness towards you. Henry is also absent. mwp2, rc3 1. This rc is dated “october,” but mow clearly means December. The error may indicate the degree to which her son’s death has affected her. 2. I.e., George. 3. mwp1 has a similar version of this letter, no doubt copied from this one. 94 to janet livingston montgomery Plymouth April 1792 My dear Friend While in an agony of soul I this day weep the loss of an amiable accomplished son, whose fillial piety was enhanced by the many amiable qualities that adorned the sensible judicious friend, I turned my mind to your loss, to your affliction, and to your letters;—my design was to look over your last and to endeavour to compose my spirits to make some proper reply to the sympathising accents contained therein; but I accidentally laid my hand on one of an older date in which you observe, “what but the expectations beyond the grave can ever make me smile in the midst of grief;—what make me suffer life after my Soldiers fall, but the blessed flattering hope of meeting him again”? In addition to this hope my dear madam, I have still a friend, the best of friends, the best of husbands and other amiable and very meritorious children , to attach me to life. Yet my weak my affectionate heart constantly 234  to janet montgomery, april 1792 wanders to the dreary wilderness and contemplates the dear remains that lie there without the rights of sepulture;—can you wonder I then weep in the most bitter anguish of soul;—a wound too deep for philosophy to paliate or the hand of time ever to heal. Yet often in the midst of distress that none but a parent can feel, me thinks I see my deceased son with all the graces of person, and the usual, the sweet smile of complacency on his countenance, enter as on former occasions of grief and with a blush of sensibility and tenderness inquire “my dear mama where now is your philosophy”? shall I reply to you my friend that I feel as if it was extinguished by the savage hand that cut down an assemblage of talents, virtues , and abilities, that would but from a series of uncommon misfortunes, have made as useful and as brilliant a figure as any on the stage. By travel, study, and observation he had acquired a thorough knowledge of mankind, was acquainted with life in all its varieties, and struggled with misfortunes with the spirit of a hero and the equanimity of the philosopher. The supreme governour of the universe lends his fiat to the success of some and frowns on the most laudable efforts of others, through all the page of life for reasons that we cannot investigate while in this vale of tears. I wish to submit in silence to the premature stroke that has removed a son so much the expectation and delight of his friends, I would endeavour to derive consolation from the recollection of his manly fortitude through sufferings, trying indeed to a youth who had ever early promise that the world could give. Yet as a friend of the celebrated Epaminondas1 who lost his life in the field of battle, observes, “when local circumstances suddenly occur to my mind with the remembrance of his amiable qualities, an expression which he used on such an occasion, a smile which had escaped him on another, and a thousand minute particulars with which grief loves to nourish its melancholy, and all combining with the insupportable idea, that nothing now remains of this great man but an heap of bones which the earth is incessantly corroding, I am seized with emotion too violent and painful to be endured”;—too painful indeed are these recollections for the tender bosom of a mother, who has...

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