Writing to a friend more than a month after the death of his wife, he says:-- "Though late in performing the promise I made you of writing you when I arrived home, I hope you will attribute it to anything but forgetfulness of that promise. The confusion and derangement consequent on such an afflicting bereavement as I have suffered have rendered it necessary for me to devote the first moments of composure to looking about me, and to collecting and arranging the fragments of the ruin which has spread such desolation over all my earthly prospects. "Oh! what a blow! 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 Lucretia 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 Lucretia everything 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 Lucretia 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. Is it strange, then, that I now feel this void, this desolateness, this loneliness, this heart-sickness; that I should feel as if my very heart itself had been torn from me? "To any one but those who knew dear Lucretia what I have said might seem to be but the extravagance of an excited imagination; but to you, who knew the dear object I lament, all that I have said must but feebly shadow her to your memory." [Illustration: STUDY FOR PORTRAIT OF LAFAYETTE Now in New York Public Library] It was well for him that he found constant occupation for his hand and brain at this critical period of his life. The Fates had dealt him this cruel blow for some good reason best known to themselves. He was being prepared for a great mission, and it was meet that his soul, like gold, should be purified by fire; but, at the same time, that the blow might not utterly overwhelm him, success in his chosen profession seemed again to be within his grasp. Writing to his parents from New York, on April 8, 1825, he says:--