The death of his wife on Christmas Day of the same year was a heavy blow. Despite her invalidism, she was a woman of much force of character and many graces of mind, to which Marshall rendered touching tribute in a quaint eulogy composed for one of his sons on the first anniversary of her death: Her judgment was so sound and so safe that I have often relied upon it in situations of some perplexity.... Though serious as well as gentle in her deportment, she possessed a good deal of chaste, delicate, and playful wit, and if she permitted herself to indulge this talent, told her little story with grace, and could mimic very successfully the peculiarities of the person who was its subject. She had a fine taste for belle-lettre reading.... This quality, by improving her talents for conversation, contributed not inconsiderably to make her a most desirable and agreeable companion. It beguiled many of those winter evenings during which her protracted ill health and her feeble nervous system confined us entirely to each other. I shall never cease to look back on them with deep interest and regret.... She felt deeply the distress of others, and indulged the feeling liberally on objects she believed to be meritorious.... She was a firm believer in the faith inculcated by the Church in which she was bred, but her soft and gentle temper was incapable of adopting the gloomy and austere dogmas which some of its professors have sought to engraft on it. Marshall believed women were the intellectual equals of men, because he was convinced that they possessed in a high degree "those qualities which make up the sum of human happiness and transform the domestic fireside into an elysium," and not because he thought they could compete on even terms in the usual activities of men.