RICHTER (Jean Paul Frederich, German author), 1763-1825. "_My beautiful flowers, my lovely flowers!_"
His wife brought him a wreath of flowers that a lady had sent him, for every one wished to add some charm to his last days. As he touched them carefully, for he could neither see nor smell them, he seemed to rejoice in the images of the flowers in his mind, for he said repeatedly, "My beautiful flowers, my lovely flowers!"
Although his friends sat around the bed, as he imagined it was night, they conversed no longer; he arranged his arms as if preparing for repose, which was to be to him the repose of death, and soon sank into a tranquil sleep.... At length his respiration became less regular, but his features always calmer, more heavenly. A slight convulsion passed over the face; the physician cried out, "That is death!" and all was quiet. The spirit had departed.
ROBERTSON (Frederick William, an English clergyman of singular purity and depth of religious feeling, and of great ability), 1816-1853. "_I cannot bear it; let me rest. I must die. Let God do his work._"
A member of his congregation, a chemist, asked him to look at his galvanic apparatus. He took the ends of the wire, completed the circuit, experiencing the tingling. He then held the end of the wire to the back of the head and neck, without a single sensation being elicited. Then he touched his forehead for a second. "Instantly a crashing pain shot through, as if my skull was stove in, and a bolt of fire were burning through and through." In the same letter he writes, "My work is done." Some hope might have been entertained if he could have had a curate to help him with his work. But the then Vicar of Brighton, rather an unsympathetic man, refused to let him have the curate on whom his heart was set. So he sank, unrelieved, into death. The dark secrets of the hospital of torture hardly reveal greater suffering than Robertson endured in those last hours. When they sought to change his position, he said, "I cannot bear it; let me rest. I must die. Let God do his work." These were his last words.
He was only thirty-seven years old when he died; an age when he had not reached the climax of his powers, or the complete development of his character and views. It is an interesting circumstance that after his death an inhabitant of Brighton who had stood aloof from his teaching during his lifetime, read his sermons and was so struck with the beauty of his teaching that in gratitude he placed a marble bust of the great preacher in the Pavilion. _London Society._