"De Witt," she said to me one day, "twice in my life I have been so
overwhelmed with the love of God that I fainted away and could hardly
be resuscitated. Don't tell me there is no heaven. I have seen it
twice." If you would know how her presence would soothe an anxiety, or
lift a burden, or cheer a sorrow, or leave a blessing on every room in
the house, ask any of the Talmages. She had tarried at her early home,
taking care of an invalid father, until the bloom of life had
somewhat faded; but she could interest the young folks with some
three or four tender passages in her own history, so that we all knew
that it was not through lack of opportunity that she was not the queen
of one household, instead of being a benediction on a whole circle of
households.
At about seventy years of age she made her last visit to my house, and
when she sat in my Philadelphia church I was more embarrassed at her
presence than by all the audience, because I felt that in religion I
had got no further than the A B C, while she had learned the whole
alphabet, and for many years had finished the Y and Z. When she went
out of this life into the next, what a shout there must have been in
heaven, from the front door clear up to the back seat in the highest
gallery! I saw the other day in the village cemetery of Somerville,
N.J., her resting-place, the tombstone having on it the words which
thirty years ago she told me she would like to have inscribed there,
namely: "The Morning Cometh."