By the Mobile Boat yesterday.
Death of Mr. Bell
Since our columns were closed we have received confirmation of
the melancholy tidings, that our young friend and former associate,
WILLIAM A. BELL, Esq., is no more. He breathed his last on the 17th
day of December, 1846, in the army of the United States, at Camargo,
Mexico. This Providential dispensation is peculiarly afflicting.
Many are the mourners that go about our streets, and the souls of
men are bowed down in sorrow. He was the pride of this
friends--the soul of the social circle--one of Nature's
noblemen:--magnanimous, generous, and kind. When he left us in May
last, he was the picture of health--with a robust constitution and a
frame of iron. But the hand of disease took hold upon him, and long
did that constitution and that unconquerable resolution battle
against it: but, alas, to no purpose--the edit had gone forth, "dust
shall return to dust again and the spirit to the God who gate it."
How true that death loves a shining mark.
It is melancholy to reflect that he died far from home, and far
away from those who loved him--without even his companions in arms
at this side--save, perhaps, one or two, sick like himself, who, to
his dying groans, could only return the devotion of a wounded
spirit, or the cry of moaning, from intense bodily sufferings. But
he has better described a soldier's dying bed. In writing to us just
two months before his own death, of one of his companions, who died
by the same camp-fire, he said: "It is hard enough, my dear friend,
to die at home amidst friends, but it is doubly hard to breathe
out life far away from all that's dear--in a foreign land--deprived
of those kind attentions which friends are enabled at home to give."
How vivid the picture! Yet how little did our friend think that he
was describing what was so soon to be his own melanchly [sic] lot.
Peace to his memory.
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