MANUSCRIPT: HCL (L 35). Ink.

PUBLICATION: (letter only) Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly XXIX (February 1946) 130.

The manuscript is dated in an unknown hand, at the bottom of the last page: April, 1853. On 19 April 1853 Mary Warner's youngest sister, Anna Charlotte Warner, died (see letter no. 118). But the handwriting of the letter is that of 1856, not 1853, and the message presumably was sent on the third anniversary of the occasion. The poem, by John Pierpont, was popular in the early forties when it appeared, in several variants, in a number of newspapers and gift books. ED's version is closest to that in The Sacred Rosary . . . , compiled by N.P. Willis, New York, 1844.