Excerpt from A Biographical Sketch of Emily Sanford Billings As to the manner in which this purpose has been executed, provided only it shall have been accomplished and the record shall fittingly present the exquisite beauty and rare virtues of the life committed to it, I have a single ambi tion, that it may in all respects be exa tly such as her taste would approve. Not exactly will the asperity of criticism be softened, but rather the spirit of criticism wid withdraw itself, where what has been written has been the spontaneous, wed-nigh involuntary product of sorrow, born of a fullness of love between the subject and writer, which made them the whole world to each other, and makes what used to seem his worth towards her now to seem to need forgiveness. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.