“There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose present enhanced the beauty and ampleness of nature herself where they walked.”

  “A more copious air invests the fields and clothes with purple light, and they know their own sun and stars. They have the heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from under them; they look at the stars with an answering ray. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. Every generation makes the discovery that its divine vigor has been dissipated and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears are made to hear celestial sounds; the eyes to behold beauty not invisible. Did not he that made that which is within make that which is without also? May we not see God? It is but a thin soil where we stand. I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a wisp of straw, which reminded me of myself.”

  Hawthorne [Nathaniel Hawthorne] and family, Blake [H.G.O. Blake] and Brown [Theophilus Brown] from Worcester, J.T. Fields [James T. Fields] and wife and Alger [William Rounseville Alger] from Boston, and many of his townspeople and children of the schools attend the funeral. He is laid in the burying-ground back of the meeting house, near the North Primary School House.

  Afterwards interred in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, next to my lot and opposite Hawthorne’s.