Ruth Marguerite Mitchell d. 1901

MITCHELL

Posted By: Volunteer - Rich Lowe
Date: 2/24/2013 at 07:38:12

One of The Little Ones.

Ruth Marguerite Mitchell was born Feb. 9, 1901, and died after a brief illness, on Sept. 24, 1901, aged 7 months, and 15 days. She was the only child and her going leaves a vacancy in the home.

Here is a little bud, a tender nursling of the spring, nipped by that bitter envious frost before a single leaf unfolds itself. Here is a little bargue [sic] freighted with costly wares for the markets of earth and heaven, launched into life and wrecked in the very harbor's mouth. A work nobly simple, yet beautifully complex. With God's fresh breath of life inspiring its every look and the power of the sweetest nature swaying its every movement, it drops from His hand in the very act of his holding it up to show its beauty to the world. It falls to pieces in an hour. The high art of its creation is negatived in a moment; its lovely mechanism goes off into dust; all its myriad contrivances for life, (no one of which any man since the world began can imitate with the slightest effect, or even rightly understand) in a few days are crumbled into mould as if they never had been at all.

In fine, a work designed for duties of seventy or eighty, or perhaps a hundred years, capable of beautiful deeds and of filling happy places in the house, the neighborhood, the state, and all along in the family or the church is destroyed, as it might seem, by some slight accident, before any one of those duties had been met, and, to outward view, annihilated as though it had never been meant for anything whatsoever in the world.

Source: Entler Scrapbook, vol. 4, Iowa Historical Library, Iowa City, IA