MANUSCRIPT: October 1880 (Harvard). This poem is incorporated in a letter written to Perez Dickinson Cowan in October 1880 when Cowan was pastor of the Congregational Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His small daughter Margaret had died 8 November 1879, and Cowan later sent ED a memorial account of her brief life. ED's reply acknowledges receipt of the brochure; the poem, written partly as prose and partly as verse, is an elegy for little Margie. The quoted lines derive from 1 Corinthians 15.35:

But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?