Caroline Mehetable Fisher Sawyer (10 Dec 1812 – 19 May 1894 | Newton MA – Somerville MA) poet, author, essayist, translator, social activist, short fiction writer, Universalist’s women’s and children’s societies advocate.

Alas! the proud are slow to feel for outcasts, wretched and forlorn! Pleasure that comes

unlooked-for, is thrice welcome; and if it stir the heart, it aught to be there. Who wants

a sequel may read on: the plain discourse which follows may supply the place of one.

Loud howled the autumn wind: night wore away too slow, and thousands watched and

wished for day. Once more I saw her, and she lay beyond life’s dim, uncertain river, a

glorious mould of fading clay, from whence the spark had fled forever. When all drossy

feelings of the day, touched by the wand of truth, dissolve away unhallowed guilt shall

in her bosom feel, a rack too fierce for language to reveal! Death, when we meet the

spectre in our walks, as we did yesterday, and shall to-morrow, soon grows familiar –

like most other things seen, not observed. Wanderer! bowed with griefs, wanderer with

the cheek so pale, oh give language to those tears! Tell, oh tell, their melancholy tale!

Sawyer, Caroline Mehetabel Fisher. The Merchant’s Widow: And Other Tales. Boston: P. Price, 1841. https://archive.org/details/merchantswidowa01sawygoog/page/n120/mode/1up