“Other farewells were also painful, for he realized that they might be final. In early February he wrote a parting letter to his closest friend, Sir William Spring. Opening with his wonder at how God had blessed him, “a poor worm, and raised but yesterday out of the dust,” with Spring’s love and esteem, he stated that he had loved Spring “before I could think you took any notice of me” and now had come to esteem and value their mutual affection, which was such that his “soul is knit to you, as the soul of Jonathan to David.” “Were I now with you,” he continued, “I should bedew that sweet bosom with the tears of affection,” for “[o]h, what a pinch will it be to me, to part with such a friend.” Yet though their parting was final in terms of this earth, he was confident that ” we shall meet in heaven, and while we live our prayers and affections shall hold an intercourse of friendship.” It may have been around this same time that, according to Thomas Hubbard’s seventeenth-century account, Winthrop, “at a solemn feast among many friends a little before their last farewell, finding his bowels yearn within him, instead of drinking to them, by breaking into a flood of tears himself, set them all aweeping...while they thought of seeing the faces of each other no more in the land of the living.”

John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father by Francis J. Bremer, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 169-170.