Who Said This?

[RJNorton]

No googling please. This quote comes from a book of historical fiction, but I have no reason to not believe it's essentially true.

Whose words are these?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"I am sorry for your distress, but I must tell you, darling, how paltry a thing Willie Lincoln's death looks from here. I do not underestimate the Pres.'s woe, but the national fuss: is it seemly? It is as if a dauphin had died. Mother sends me a cutting from the Star: Lying in state in the Green Room? Before a funeral in the East one? Children die each day in the normal order of things: think of the ones my mother lost, infants, more than twenty years ago. The President's grief for his son is ill-proportioned to the merely abstract sorrow he can feel at reports of grown men dying in quantity, just across the river from Washington. Madame Presi- dent should come downstairs and get out to the hospitals, so that she can see all the boys, older than her Willie, but still boys for all that, dying far from their own mothers' comfort- ing arms."