Died February 18, 1876

Some hours before dawn on Friday, February 18, Dr. Thornton alerted ned and Emma Crow who had rushed up from Newport. Lamentably, he told them, his efforts could not arrest pneumonia.  A little before seven, Charlotte roused momentarily.  Through dull eyes, she recognized the faces circled around her:   Sallie, and Emma, and Emma Crow.  Quietly, Ned bent down and offered her a sip from her cup.  "Come, Auntie," he said, "here is your milk punch."  A flicker of amusement played for a moment across her face.   "Punch, brothers," she said, half audibly, "punch with care."   Then she fell into a deep sleep.  She died at ten minuetes past nine.

New York Tribune (Nine Years later)

By 10 A.M. on February 21, throungs had gathered outside the Parker House to pass in a slow procession beside Charlotte's casket.  "The whole city is puring through the rooms where dear Cushla is lying with the largest, calmest, most majestical face I ever saw," Lanier wrote his wife that morning.  The file continued until the pall-bearers carried the bier down and across the frozen street---so jammed that fourteen extra policemen had been called into service -- through the portals of  King's Chapel.

Once the bearers had placed the coffin at the foot of the pulpit, in front of Charlotte's family and friends and a host of actors representing the profession, flowers were massed upon and around it.  The Reverend henry W. Foote eulogized the woman of genius now lying here who had embodied the highest aims of art.   Boston and much of the country had troveled a long road since Charlotte Cushman had first startled her family with the word that she would pursue a career on the stage.   In those old days, said the minister, the world had "sneered at the possibility of Virtue in dramatic life, and by the sneer and what went with it," had done "its worst to make virtue impossible."

But times had altered; the years had shown in lives like Miss Cushman's that a pure spirit could "go stainless," even in the theatre.   Enlightened minds could now see that whatsoever thinngs were true, whatsover things were lovely, it was a Christian admonition to think on these things., whether one knelt within these hallowed white walls or sat beneath the painted vault of a theatre.  By Miss Cushman's efforts, society was purer, the theatre had risen by her example.  Let Boston adn the world rejoice.

After the Psalm eight students from the Cushman School, at the prompting of Charley Wiggin, placed laurel and pond lilies, forget-me-nots and immortelles on the coffin in tribute to katharine's famed line, "Saw you not even now a blessed troop invite me to a banquet, whose bright faces Cast a thoussand beams upon me, like the sun?  They promised me eternal happiness And brought me garlands."

The procession to Mount Auburn would slowly up Beacon Street to the hill, past the State House where Emma's horace mann statue gazed out over Boston Common, past the silent crowds huddling together in the winter wind.  A journalist saw the crowd as representative of the many thousands who had formed Charlott's audience over the years.  "No other woman of our day-- in America at least-- was as well known to so many people.

For two hours the cortege moved through the narrow streets and over the Charles to Cambridge, through the high gates of Mount Auburn where in time the grave stones would read like a cast in Charlotte's play:  Mary Devlin and Edwin Booth, James T. and Annie Fields, Harriet Hosmer, Julia Ward Howe, Longfellow and Lowell.

New York Tribune:

"The greatness of Charlotte cushman was that of an exceptional because grand and striking personality, combined with extraordinary power to embody the highest ideals of majesty, pathos, and appalling anguish."  An inspirational fire, an opulent intellect, an abounding character and genius "were victorious and imperial in Charlotte Cushman.

New York Herald:

Lawrence Barrett wrote:

For American actors, Lawrence Barrett, spoke:  "Bigotry itself must stand abashed before the life of our dead Queen, whose every thought and act were given for years to an art which ignorance and envy battled against in vain centuries."

New York Times:

Times borrowed the phrase from Browning:  Charlotte Cushman, it is true, was "but an actress," yet her fame would be as enduring as any conqueror's. 

In the English-speaking world there was hadrly a place where her name was not a household word.  She had lives and died "a Virgin Queen of the dramatic stage."  To the New York Hearold, "Neither Ristori, Madame Janauschek, nor even Rachel could equal" Charlotte Cushman "in her own realm."  In dying, said Scribner's, the common run of players could be replaced as books could be reprinted or pictures duplicated.  but dramatic genius could be no more repeated than one lightning flash could match another.  Charlott's sleepless Queen of Scotland, her weird Queen of the gypsies, her un-queened Queen of Henry VIII-- these Queens uniquely find it difficult to believe, but Charlotte's art had surpassed that of her most eminent contemporaries, George Eliot, George Sand, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "They do not stand as high in their respective professions as she stand on the stage."  Agreeing, James McVicker wrote, "They tasted but ginerly of the world's applause; she dranined the brimming goblet."

In Closing.....

One summer day years after her death, William Winter stood recollecting the vivid impressions which the name on the grave's tall obeoisk rekindled.   A gardener looed up from clipping the grass and pointing to the stone, voiced a comment that might serve for Charlotte Cushman's epitaph and measure.

"She was considerable of a woman, for a lay-actress."

[source: BRIGHT PARTICULAR STAR * THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN BY Joseph Leach 1970]

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