Emmeline B. Wells, General Relief Society President, 1910–1921
Upon arrival at Nauvoo, Emmeline B. Wells recounts: "I could see one person who towered away and above all the others around him. . . . Before I was aware of it he came to me, and when he took my hand, I was simply electrified, —thrilled through and through to the tips of my fingers. . . .
" . . . The one thought that filled my soul was, I have seen the Prophet of God, he has taken me by the hand."
"Joseph Smith, the Prophet," Young Woman's Journal, Dec. 1903, 555.
Josiah Quincy visited Nauvoo shortly before his election as mayor of Boston. Of Joseph Smith he observed: "It is by no means improbable that some future text-book, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen? And it is by no means impossible that the answer to that interrogatory may be thus written:
"Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet."
Figures of the Past (1884), 376.
