THE RANDALL FAMILY 199
me her thankfulness for his delicate, considerate, tender care for her, — above all, in never opposing her desires, or seeking to influence them according to his own ideas, but only aiming from first to last to help her do effectively the things she wanted to do. I never heard her say so much, in praise of any other man, as she more than once said of him. When, after a couple of years, this great labor was done, all her brother's wishes most faithfully observed, and all her own benevolent intentions put in the way of sure accomplishment, the poor, over-taxed, over-wearied frame gave way, and she fell into a state of melancholy, aggra- vated by hallucinations mostly painful, but soothed by the care of faithful, tender, and deeply attached nurses, from which she was at last released by death. Never on this earth did a life so full of the divine beauty of unselfishness pass into an eclipse more pathetic. But whatever in the life invisible may come to the " good and faithful servant " in this life below will surely come to this humble, loyal, exquisitely lovely soul.
There is a charming glimpse of Miss Randall, in her singing days, at the age of twenty-eight, contained in a letter of George William Curtis which was written while he and his brother were living on Captain Nathan Bar- rett's farm at Concord. From this letter, published in "Harper's Monthly Magazine" for December, 1897, and dated " Concord, Friday Ev'g, May loth, 1844," the fol- lowing passage belongs here : —
" For the last three evenings I have been in the village hearing Belinda Randall play and sing. With the smallest voice, she sings so delicately, and understands her power so well, that I have been charmed. It was a beautiful crown to my day, not regal and majestic like Frances O.'s in the ripe Summer, but woven of Spring flowers and
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