James Buchanan [Pg 111] [Pg 111] The father returned the letter unopened and without comment. Death had only widened the breach. It would have been gratifying to know that the two lovers were together for a moment at the end. For such a meeting as that there are no words but Edwin Arnold’s: “But he—who loved her too well to dread The sweet, the stately, the beautiful dead— He lit his lamp, and took the key, And turn’d it!—alone again—he and she!” For him there was not even a glimpse of her as she lay in her coffin, nor a whisper that some day, like Evelyn Hope, she might “wake, and remember and understand.” With that love that asks only for the right to serve, and feeling perhaps that no pen could do her justice, he obtained permission to write a paragraph for a local paper, which was published unsigned: “Departed this life, on Thursday morning last, in the twenty-third year of her age, while on a visit to friends in the city of Philadelphia, Miss Anne C. Coleman, daughter [Pg 112]of Robert Coleman, Esquire of this city. [Pg 112] “It rarely falls to our lot to shed a tear over the remains of one so much and so deservedly beloved as was the deceased. She was everything which the fondest parent, or the fondest friend could have wished her to be. “Although she was young and beautiful and accomplished, and the smiles of fortune shone upon her, yet her native modesty and worth made her unconscious of her own attractions. Her heart was the seat of all the softer virtues which ennoble and dignify the character of woman. “She has now gone to a world, where, in the bosom of her God, she will be happy with congenial spirits. May the memory of her virtues be ever green in the hearts of her surviving friends. May her mild spirit, which on earth still breathes peace and good will, be their guardian angel to preserve them from the faults to which she was ever a stranger. “The spider’s most attenuated thread Is cord, is cable, to man’s tender tie On earthly bliss—it breaks at every breeze.”
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