Page:Tributes to Helen Bell, Woman's Progress, April 1895.djvu/12

Rh And when I think of Miss Bell I feel the value of that fine old Anglo-Saxon title—the Lady! Not merely the gentlewoman, but the dispenser of the sweet, every-day charities, the Lady who assumes her proper relation with all who are dependent; the St. Elizabeth in whose apron the loaves will turn to roses should there be greater need of flowers than of bread; the lady around whom knights rally, proud to wear her colors;—the mistress of her castle and of the hearts of all who are glad and proud to know they shared the life, and had part in the work that occupied and interested Helen Bell!

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HELEN BELL.

"A star has set, a star hath risen."

We cannot fail to believe that the light which shone upon so many with clear and comforting radiance is already shining for joy and blessing, somewhere, in those illimitable spaces which we call Heaven.

Some lives are sent down to this dear old world of ours, which seem to bind us not only to themselves but to it by the force and intensity of their very humaneness, their appreciation and delight in its beauty and its joy, while by the expansion of their higher and spiritual powers, their abnegation, their aspirations and their devotion, they make fast for us a link in the chain that draws us toward the unseen and the eternal.

Such a nature was Helen Bell's, rejoicing, as she did, in all the fairest things of earth, in nature, in art and literature, from the sunset cloud, the mountain peak, and the stars of night to the commonest flower that fringes the dusty highway. Enjoying all that is good in art and in literature, choosing with unerring instinct the best in all, she made these treasures her own in the truest sense of possession, the ownership of understanding and appreciation, always realizing that each endowment and each acquisition was a sacred trust which she held for others, something to be used for the world's brightening and uplifting.

Subscribing with almost childlike simplicity to the evangelical faith of the Church of her fathers, the Moravian Church, treasuring with jealous affection the memorials of its heroic past, and aiding in its works of present usefulness, her attitude towards other religious bodies, Jewish and Christian, was broadly Catholic, a brotherhood of faith seeming to be an integral part of a character whose leading impulse was the brotherhood of man. Those who believe in heredity can trace some of Helen Bell's noblest traits, her self-forgetfulness, her public spirit, her restrained enthusiasm and her fine balance of character to an ancestry, Quaker and