"For more than forty years I have been in possession of a heart that loved me ardently: that happiness is no more. But I kept my treasure ten years longer than I had any reason to expect. Yesterday we committed my beloved to the grave.... "I saw her declining in strength through failure of appetite, but ever hoped for finer weather and change of air to restore her. But the fine weather came too late to restore her. From want of blood her heart became fatally weak, and she died just as her brother did, the late Sir John Kennaway, through failure of the heart and consequent mortification of the feet. I now believe that local death began on the night of the 5th. Her sufferings in the feet were great, and we could do nothing to allay them. Her breathlessness (also from weakness of the heart) we could aid by fanning. She knew she could not recover, and only prayed for 'release.' Her prayer was granted early on Sunday morning, 16th July. "Of course I feel very desolate, and to live quite alone in declining years [Footnote: Some few years later he married his first wife's devoted friend and companion who had lived with them for eleven years, and who took the greatest care of Newman till he died in 1897.] seems unnatural and unhealthful; but I cannot form any decisions at present. I am conscious of excellent health and unbroken strength, and after forty years of happy love should be very ungrateful to repine. "By God's help I mean to be cheerful and active.... "I am, your affectionate friend, "F. W. Newman." This is the epitaph Newman had placed over his wife's grave:-- "With no superiority of intellect, yet by the force of love, by sweet piety, by tender compassion, by coming down to the lowly, by unselfishness and simplicity of life, by a constant sense of God's Presence, by devout exercises, private and social, she achieved much of Christian saintliness and much of human happiness. "She has left a large void in her husband's heart. "Obiit, _16th July_, 1876." Newman always spoke of his wife as "the most affectionate and tender- hearted of mortals." There was always a very great affection between them. His letters all show this. Their married life was a long intercourse of happiness, _un_-"chequered by disputes." [Footnote: "Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes."--R. L. Stevenson.] Still, there was not (as is shown, I think, in many ways) strong community of interests. For in all Newman's laborious philological studies--his learned lectures, articles, and researches, scriptural and literary, his speculations in the realms of deep thought--she was to all intents and purposes practically outside his mental door. She was never greatly inclined to join in the society of his learned friends; but this was more from a sense of modesty, because she was afraid of not being in sympathy with them; because she thought that she was not clever enough.