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#4290
Washington D.C. Dec. 8. 1882
My dear friend Parker Pillsbury,
Thanks for your thoughtful letter. I am deeply touched by it. I feel in it the throbbing of your own true heart. It comes as a voice in the wilderness and has a lonely sound. You are looking over a field where the workers were once numerous, but now few, and from which in the order of nature, the few that remain will soon be gone. Of the platform men of distinction in the great work of our lives. Few besides yourself and Wendell Phillips remain and most of the [rank and?]
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file have gone where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary one at rest. They are not to be mourned. We should rather rejoice that such lives as theirs were possible to our planet. You may remember that much of the feeling which thrilled me at Nantucket more than forty years ago, arose from the surprise that whitemen and women could feel for the woes of my race and were willing to encounter every species of wrong and abuse to remove those woes. It was to me a tremendous revelation. I had not thought such people possible. All I had seen a few
years before were of a totally different character. Now when any one of the noble band of early abolitionists falls– no matter how distant I feel as if I ought to be there to say all hail and farewell! I felt especially so yesterday when I learned that our precious friend Benjamin [Ferris?], one of the finest and best of men, fell like a rife shock. I can never forget his benignant countenance as he gave me his hand a few weeks ago. But I am not answering your question. I was in the early autumn somewhat ailing, around but not at the top in health and some how the press got hold of the facts
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and every little while I see my self referred to as being an invalid. I am now however in fair condition, and move about the world, some say, with a lighter and firmer step than many younger men.
I am glad to learn from those of my friends by whom you were each seen, that you show few of the marks of age.
Whether in life or death– Truly yours always Fredk Douglass
Concord (N.H.) Public Library sent by Robert F. Nardini of Concord 3/83