text:  Preyed upon alas! by those anxieties that pierce deepest into the noblest hearts--anxieties for the sakes--even on account of the very means of subsistence--of his own household and his own hearth--yet was he in his declining shall we call them disastrous years on the whole faithful to the divine spirit with which it had pleased Heaven to endow him--on the whole obedient to its best inspirations; while he rejoiced to illumine the paths of poverty with light which indeed was light on heaven and from an inexhaustible fancy teeming to the genial warmth of the heart in midst of chill and gloom continued to the very last to strew along the weary ways of this world flowers so beautiful in their freshness that to eyes too familiar with tears they looked as if dropped from heaven