CHAPTER XIV 



THE LAST YEARS 



1895-1907 



IN order not to interrupt the account of Mrs. Agassiz's 

 last decade at Radcliffe College, nothing has been said 

 about her personal life during this period. Yet in these 

 later as in her earlier years, her closest interests lay apart 

 from the college that she so faithfully served, and formed 

 a separate chapter in her experience. They centred in her 

 family, and the joys and sorrows that came to her children 

 and grandchildren were the events that touched her most 

 keenly. Her social instincts, her sympathy with children 

 that was as keen after as before she was eighty years old, 

 her calm acceptance of sorrow, her freedom from morbid- 

 ness, her pleasure in books and above all in music, her un- 

 qualified affection for Nahant still remained with her, as 

 she gradually withdrew from some of the more active 

 occupations in which she had previously been engaged. 

 One year melted into another with little to differentiate 

 it from its fellows, and although the extracts from diaries 

 and letters that follow are in general widely separated from 

 each other in date, they serve, in the lack of other records, 

 to represent the continuity of her thoughts and occupa- 

 tions, and read consecutively they convey an impression 

 of the way in which, blessed with her own goodness, she 

 was passing her old age. 



June 5, 1896. Reached Nahant before tea. Heav- 

 enly peace. 



