Klopstock stood beside her, and endeavoured, as well as the agony of his feelings would permit, to pray with her and to support her. He praised her fortitude:--"You have endured like an angel! God has been with you! he _will_ be with you! were I so wretched as not to be a Christian, I should now become one." He added with strong emotion, "Be my guardian angel, if God permit!" She replied tenderly, "You have ever been mine!" He repeated his request more fervently: she answered with a look of undying love, "Who would not be so!" He hastened from the room, unable to endure more. After he was gone, her sister,[75] who attended her through her sufferings, said to her, "God will help you!"--"Yes, to heaven!" replied the saint. After a faint struggle, she added, "It is over!" her head sunk on the pillow, and while her eyes, until glazed by death, were fixed tenderly on her sister,--thus with the faith of a Christian, and the courage of a martyr, she resigned into the hands of her Creator, a life which had been so blameless and so blessed, so intimate with love and joy, that only such a death could crown it, by proving what an angel a woman _can_ be, in doing, feeling, and suffering.[76] * * * * * It was by many expected that Klopstock would have made the loss of his Meta the subject of a poem; but he early declared his resolution not to do this, nor to add to the collection of odes and songs formerly addressed to her. He gives his reasons for this silence. "I think that before the public a man should speak of his wife with the same modesty as of himself; and this principle would destroy the enthusiasm required in poetry. The reader too, not without reason, would feel himself justified in refusing implicit credit to the fond eulogium written on one beloved; and my love for her who made me the happiest among men, is too sincere to let me allow my readers to call it in question." Yet in a little poem[77] addressed afterwards to his friend Schmidt, and probably not intended for publication, he alludes to his loss, in a tone of deep feeling, and complains of the recollections which distract his sleepless nights. Again the form of my lost wife I see, She lies before me, and she dies again; Again she smiles on me, again she dies, Her eyes now close, and comfort me no more. He indulged the fond thought that she hovered, a guardian spirit, near him still,-- O if thou love me yet, by heavenly laws Condemn me not! I am a man and mourn,-- Support me though unseen! And he foretells that, even in distant ages,--"in times perhaps more virtuous than ours," his grief would be remembered, and the name of his Meta revered. And shall it not be so?--it must--it will:--as long as truth, virtue, tenderness, dwell in woman's breast--so long shall Meta be dear to her sex; for she has honoured us among men on earth, and among saints in Heaven!