"It happened that, just at this moment, I was entering her chamber-door, with Charles in my arms, to pay her my usual visit, and to pray with her. The nurse met me affrighted, calling for help. Your mother, the family, and neighbors, full of the tenderest sympathy and kindness, and the doctor, thronged the house in a few minutes; everything was done that could be done, to save her life. But her appointed time had come, and no earthly skill or power could stay the hand of death. It was the Lord who gave her to you, the chiefest of all your earthly blessings, and it is he that has taken her away; and may you be enabled, my son, from the heart to say, 'Blessed be the name of the Lord!'" The heart of Morse was well nigh broken. The woman he had idolized had gone from him in a moment. He wrote back to his father: "Oh, is it possible? is it possible? Shall I never see my dear wife again? But I cannot trust myself to write on the subject. I need your prayers, and those of Christian friends, to God for support. I fear I shall sink under it. "Oh, take good care of her dear children! "Your agonized son, "FINLEY." Travelling by stage, he did not reach New Haven till his wife had been buried a week. A month later he wrote to a friend: "I dare not yet give myself up to the full survey of its desolating effects; every day brings to my mind a thousand new and fond connections with dear Lucretia, all now ruptured. I feel a dreadful void, a heart-sickness, which time does not seem to heal, but rather to aggravate. You know the intensity of the attachment which existed between dear L. and me, never for a moment interrupted by the smallest cloud; an attachment founded, I trust, in the purest love, and daily strengthening by all the motives which the ties of _nature_ and more especially of _religion_ furnish. "I found in dear L. everything that I could wish. Such ardor of affection, so uniform, so unaffected, I never saw nor read of, but in her. My fear with regard to the measure of my affection toward her, was not that I might fail of 'loving her as my own flesh,' but that I should put her in the place of Him who has said, 'Thou shalt have no other gods but me.' I felt this to be my greatest danger, and to be saved from this _idolatry_ was often the subject of my earnest prayers. If I had desired anything in my dear L. different from what she was, it would have been that she had been _less lovely_. My whole soul seemed wrapped up in her; with her was connected all that I expected of happiness on earth."