Daughters of the Puritans Part 2

There her sanity comes in to check her emotionalism. She is reflecting upon another experience with Dr. Channing when she comes very near making a criticism upon him. She tells us that she does not mean him; he is excepted from these remarks, but she says, "There are few occasions which will authorize a minister to excite the feelings of an audience in a very great degree, and none which can make it allowable for him to rest in mere excitement." To complete the portraiture of her soul, I will take a pa.s.sage from a letter written at the age of twenty-five, when death has at last stripped her of all her family, "I believe that all events that befall us are exactly such as are best adapted to improve us; and I find in a perfect confidence in the wisdom and love which I know directs them, a source of peace which no other thing can give; and in the difficulty which I find in acting upon this belief I see a weakness of nature, which those very trials are designed to a.s.sist us in overcoming, and which trial alone can conquer."

Mary Pickards were not common even in that generation, but this creed was then common, and this blend of reason and religious feeling, fearlessly called "piety," was characteristic of Channing, her teacher, and of Henry Ware, afterward her husband. It was the real "Channing Unitarianism." Pity there is no more of it.

Mary was sixteen years old,--to be exact, sixteen and a half; the serene and beautiful faith of Channing had done its perfect work upon her; and she was now ready for whatever fate, or as she would have said, Providence, might choose to send. It sent the business failure of Mr. Pickard, in which not only his own fortune was swept away but also the estate of Mr. Lovell was involved. Upon the knowledge of this disaster, Mary wrote a cheerful letter, in which she said: "I should be sorry to think you consider me so weak as to bend under a change of fortune to which all are liable." Certainly she will not bend, but she is obliged to quit school and return to the shattered home.

Before the summer was over, her grandfather, Mr. Lovell, died; whether the end was hastened by the financial embarra.s.sments in which Mr.

Pickard had involved him, is not said. Mrs. Lovell, the grandmother, followed her husband in two years,--for Mary, two years of a.s.siduous nursing and tender care. Perhaps one sentence from a letter at this time will a.s.sist us in picturing her in this exacting service. She says that she is leading a monotonous existence, that her animal spirits are not sufficient for both duty and solitude, "And when evening closes, and my beloved charge is laid peacefully to rest, excitement ceases, and I am thrown on myself for pleasure."

With the death of the grandmother, the home was broken up, and Mary, trying to help her father do a little business without capital, went to New York city as his commercial agent. Her letters to her father are "almost exclusively business letters," and he on his part gives her "directions for the sale and purchase, not only of muslins and moreens, but also of skins, saltpetre, and the like."

Details of this period of her career are not abundant in the Memoirs, and the death of her father, in 1823, put an end to her business apprenticeship.

Apparently, she was not entirely dest.i.tute. At the time of his disaster, her father wrote, "As we calculated you would, after some time, have enough to support yourself, without mental or bodily exertion." That is, presumably, after the settlement of her grandfather's estate. As her biographer says, "Every member of her own family had gone, and she had smoothed the pa.s.sage of everyone." But she had many friends, and one is tempted to say, Pity she could not have settled down in cozy quarters and made herself comfortable.

Indeed she did make a fair start. She joined a couple of friends, going abroad in search of health, for a visit to England. She had relatives on the Lovell side, in comfortable circ.u.mstances near London, and an aunt on her father's side, in the north of England, in straightened circ.u.mstances. She resolved to make the acquaintance of all these relatives.

The party arrived in Liverpool in April, 1824, and for a year and a half, during which their headquarters were in London, Paris was visited, Southern England and Wales were explored, and finally the Lovell relatives were visited and found to have good hearts and open arms. For these eighteen months, Mary Pickard's friends could have wished her no more delightful existence. She had tea with Mrs.

Barbauld, heard Irving, then the famous London preacher, and saw other interesting persons and charming things in England. There is material for a very interesting chapter upon this delightful experience. It was followed by a drama of misery and horror, in which she was both spectator and actor, when young and old died around her as if smitten by pestilence, and her own vigorous const.i.tution was irreparably broken.

This episode was vastly more interesting to her than the pleasant commonplace of travel, and much more in keeping with what seems to have been her destiny. In the autumn of her second year abroad, she went to discover her aunt, sister of Mr. Pickard, in Yorkshire. The writer of the Memoirs says that this visit "forms the most remarkable and in some respects the most interesting and important chapter of her life." She found her aunt much better than she expected, nearly overpowered with joy to see her, living in a little two story cottage of four rooms, which far exceeded anything she ever saw for neatness.

The village bore the peculiarly English name of Osmotherly, and was the most primitive place she had ever been in. The inhabitants were all of one cla.s.s and that the poorer cla.s.s of laborers, ignorant as possible, but simple and sociable. Terrible to relate, smallpox, typhus fever, and whooping cough were at that moment epidemic in that village.

It will be impossible to put the situation before us more briefly than by quoting a pa.s.sage from one of her letters: "My aunt's two daughters are married and live in this village; one of them, with three children, has a husband at the point of death with a fever; his brother died yesterday of smallpox, and two of her children have the whooping-cough; added to this, their whole dependence is upon their own exertions, which are of course entirely stopped now.... You may suppose, under such a state of things, I shall find enough to do."

The death of the husband, whom of course Miss Pickard nursed through his illness, is reported in the next letter, which contains also this characteristic statement, "It seems to me that posts of difficulty are my appointed lot and my element, for I do feel lighter and happier when I have difficulties to overcome. Could you look in upon me you would think it impossible that I could be even tolerably comfortable, and yet I am cheerful, and get along as easily as possible, and am in truth happy."

Evidently, all we can do with such a person is to congratulate her over the most terrible experiences. In a letter five days later, the baby dies of whooping-cough, and in her arms; a fortnight later, the mother dies of typhus fever; within another month, two boys, now orphans, are down with the same fever at once, and one of them dies.

In the s.p.a.ce of eight weeks, she saw five persons of one family buried, and four of them she had nursed. By this time, the aunt was ill, and Miss Pickard nursed her to convalescence.

This campaign had lasted three months, and she left the scene of combat with a clear conscience. She was allowed a breathing spell of a month in which to visit some pleasant friends and recuperate her strength, when we find her back in Osmotherly again nursing her aunt.

It was the end of December and she was the only servant in the house.

Before this ordeal was over, she was taken ill herself, and had to be put to bed and nursed. In crossing a room, a cramp took her; she fell on the floor, lay all night in the cold, calling in vain for a.s.sistance. She did not finally escape from these terrible scenes until the end of January, five months from the time she entered them.

Miss Pickard returned to Boston after an absence of about two years and a half, during which time, as one of her friends wrote her, "You have pa.s.sed such trying scenes, have so narrowly escaped, and done more, much more, than almost any body ever did before." She went away a dear school-girl friend and a valued acquaintance; she was welcomed home as a martyr fit to be canonized, and was received as a conquering heroine.

In a letter dated from Gretna Green, where so many run-away lovers have been made happy, she playfully reflects upon the possibilities of her visit, if only she had a lover, and concludes that she "must submit to single blessedness a little longer." Our sympathies would have been less taxed if she had submitted to single blessedness to the end. Why could she not now be quiet, let well enough alone, and make herself comfortable? Destiny had apparently ordered things for her quite differently. One cannot avoid his destiny, and it was her destiny to marry, and marriage was to bring her great happiness, tempered by great sorrows.

The man who was to share her happiness and her sorrows was Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., then the almost idolized minister of the Second Church, in Boston. Mr. Ware was the son of another Henry Ware, professor of theology at Harvard, whose election to the chair of theology in 1806 opened the great Unitarian controversy. Two sons of Professor Ware entered the ministry, Henry and William, the latter the first Unitarian minister settled in New York city. Rev. John F. Ware, well remembered as pastor of Arlington St. Church in Boston, was the son of Henry, so that for more than half a century, the name of Ware was a great factor in Unitarian history.

After Dr. Channing, Henry Ware was perhaps the most popular preacher in any Boston pulpit. One sermon preached by him on a New Year's eve, upon the Duty of Improvement, became memorable. In spite of a violent snow storm, the church was filled to overflowing, a delegation coming from Cambridge. Of this sermon, a hearer said: "No words from mortal lips ever affected me like those." There was a difference between Unitarian preaching then and now. That famous sermon closed like this: "I charge you, as in the presence of G.o.d, who sees and will judge you,--in the name of Jesus Christ, who beseeches you to come to him and live,--by all your hopes of happiness and life,--I charge you let not this year die, and leave you impenitent. Do not dare to utter defiance in its decaying hours. But, in the stillness of its awful midnight, prostrate yourselves penitently before your Maker; and let the morning sun rise upon you, thoughtful and serious men." One does not see how the so-called 'Evangelicals' could have quarreled with that preaching.

Mr. Ware had been in his parish nine years, his age was thirty-two, he was in the prime of life, and at the climax of his power and his popularity. Three years before, he had been left a widower with three young children, one of whom became Rev. John F. Ware. That these two intensely religious natures, that of Mary Pickard and that of Henry Ware, should have been drawn together is not singular. In writing to his sister, Mr. Ware speaks tenderly of his late wife and says, "I have sought for the best mother to her children, and the best I have found." Late in life, one of these children said, "Surely G.o.d never gave a boy such a mother or a man such a friend."

Miss Pickard engaged to be a very docile wife. "Instead of the self-dependent self-governed being you have known me," she writes to a friend, "I have learned to look to another for guidance and happiness." She is "as happy as mortal can be." Indeed it was almost too much for earth. "It has made me," she says, "more willing to leave the world and enjoy the happiness of heaven than I ever thought I should be. Strange that a thing from which of all others, I should have expected the very opposite effect, should have done this."

The year following the marriage of these saintly lovers,--one can call them nothing less,--was one of exceeding happiness and of immense activity to both. It is not said, but we can see that each must have been a tonic to the other. Considerate persons felt a scruple about taking any of the time of their pastor's wife. "Mrs. Ware," said one, "at home and abroad, is the busiest woman of my acquaintance," and others felt that way. Before the year ended, Mrs. Ware had a boy baby of her own to increase her occupations and her happiness. It lived a few bright years, long enough to become a very attractive child and to give a severe wrench to her heart when it left her. This experience seems to have a certain fitness in a life in which every joy was to bring sorrow and every sorrow, by sheer will, was to be turned to joy.

Of Mr. Ware, it is said that this first year "was one of the most active and also, to all human appearance, one of the most successful of his ministry." He put more work into his sermons, gave increased attention to the details of his parish, delivered a course of lectures, and undertook other enterprises, some of which are specified; and, during a temporary absence of Mrs. Ware, wrote her that he had hoped he had turned over a new leaf, "but by foolish degrees, I have got back to all my accustomed carelessness and waste of powers, and am doing nothing in proportion to what I ought to do."

But man is mortal, and there is a limit to human endurance. Mr. Ware could not lash himself into greater activity; but he was in good condition to be ill. In a journey from Northampton, he was prostrated by inflammation of the lungs, with hemorrhages, and after several weeks, Mrs. Ware, herself far from well, went to him and finally brought him home. This was the beginning of what became a very regular annual experience. I met a lady who was brought up on the Memoirs of Mary L. Ware, and who briefly put what had impressed her most, in this way: She said, "It seemed as though Mr. Ware was always going off on a journey for his health, and that Mrs. Ware was always going after him to bring him home"; if we remember this statement, and add the fact that these calls came more than once when Mrs. Ware was on the sick list herself, we shall be able greatly to shorten our history.

This was the end of Mr. Ware's parish work. He was nursed through the winter and, in early spring, Mrs. Ware left her baby and took her invalid husband abroad, in pursuit of health, spending a year and a half in England, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. It was, she afterward said, the most trying period of her life. Mr. Ware alternated between being fairly comfortable and very miserable, so that these Memoirs say "He enjoyed much, but suffered more." Still the travels would be interesting if we had time to follow them.

Near the close of the first year abroad, Mrs. Ware's second child was born in Rome, and, although this was as she would have said, "providential," never was a child less needed in a family. Mrs. Ware had then two babies on her hands, and of these, her invalid husband was the greater care. In the following August, Mrs. Ware arrived in Boston with her double charge, and had the happiness to know that Mr.

Ware was somewhat better in health than when he left home, a year and a half before.

His parish, during his absence, had been in the care of a colleague, no other than the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you remember the New Year's Eve sermon of Mr. Ware, it will be evident that he must have left behind him a very conservative parish, and you will not be surprised that in about four years, Mr. Emerson found his chains intolerable.

Mr. Ware had been invited to a professorship in the Harvard Divinity School, and it was to this and not to his parish that he returned. For the steady, one might say monotonous, duties of his professorship, Mr.

Ware's health was generally sufficient. The lecture room did not exact the several hundred parish calls then demanded by a large city church, nor the exhausting effort which Mr. Ware and Dr. Channing put into the delivery of a sermon; and the lectures, once prepared, could be delivered and re-delivered from year to year. Real leisure was impossible to one of Mr. Ware's temperament, but here was a life of comparative leisure; and for Mrs. Ware, who shared all the joys and sorrows of her husband, the twelve years that follow brought a settled existence and very much happiness. Neither her own health nor that of her husband was ever very firm, and there was always a great emptiness in the family purse, but with Mrs. Ware, these were, as with Paul, "light afflictions" which were but for a moment, and she did not let them disturb her happiness.

Impossible as it may seem, they contributed to her happiness. She made them contribute to it. She says in a letter of 1831, "Of my winter's sickness I cannot write; it contained a long life of enjoyment, and what I hoped would be profitable thought and reflection." She repeats this statement to another correspondent, and says, with apparent regret, that the illness did not bring her "to that cheerful willingness to resign my life, after which I strove." You cannot send this woman any trial which she will not welcome, because she wants to be made to want to go to heaven, and she is as yet not quite ready for it.

Mr. Ware has been dangerously ill, and of course she could not spare herself for heaven until he recovered, but this trial did something quite as good for her: "My husband's danger renewed the so oft repeated testimony that strength is ever at hand for those who need it, gave me another exercise of trust in that mighty arm which can save to the uttermost, and in its result is a new cause for grat.i.tude to Him who has so abundantly blessed me all the days of my life." It is good to see what the old-fashioned doctrine that G.o.d really is, and is good, did for one who actually believed.

That first baby, whom she left behind when she went abroad with her invalid husband, died in 1831; the mother fainted when the last breath left the little body; but this is the way she writes of it: "I have always looked upon the death of children rather as a subject of joy than sorrow, and have been perplexed at seeing so many, who would bear what seemed to me much harder trials with firmness, so completely overwhelmed by this, as is frequently the case."

After that, one is almost ashamed to mention the trifle that the income of this family was very small. Mr. Ware, after 1834 _Dr._ Ware, held a new professorship, the endowment of which was yet mostly imaginary. The social demands took no account of the family income; the unexpected guest always dropping in; at certain times, it is said, "shoals of visitors;" and the larder always a little scantily furnished. If one wants to know how one ought to live under such circ.u.mstances, here is your shining example. "There were no apologies at that table," we are told. "If unexpected guests were not always filled, they were never annoyed, nor suffered to think much about it."

"I remember," says a guest, "the wonder I felt at her humility and dignity in welcoming to her table on some occasion a troop of accidental guests, when she had almost nothing to offer but her hospitality. The absence of all apologies and of all mortification, the ease and cheerfulness of the conversation, which became the only feast, gave me a lesson never forgotten, although never learned."

The problem of dress was as simple to Mrs. Ware as was the entertainment of her guests. "As to her attire," says an intimate friend, "we should say no one thought of it at all, because of its simplicity, and because of her ease of manners and dignity of character. Yet the impression is qualified, though in one view confirmed, by hearing that, in a new place of residence, so plain was her appearance on all occasions, the villagers suspected her of reserving her fine clothes for some better cla.s.s." There are those who might consider these circ.u.mstances, very sore privations. What Mrs.

Ware says of them is, "I have not a word of complaint to make. We are far better provided for than is necessary to our happiness." I am persuaded that this is an immensely wholesome example and that more of this kind of woman is needed to mother the children of our generation.

In a letter to one of her daughters, she says she has great sympathy with the struggles of young people, that she had struggles too and learned her lessons young, that she found very early in life that her own position was not in the least affected by these externals, "I soon began to look upon my oft-turned dress with something like pride, certainly with great complacency; and to see in that and all other marks of my mother's prudence and consistency, only so many proofs of her dignity and self-respect,--the dignity and self-respect which grew out of her just estimate of the true and the right in herself and in the world."

We have seen enough of this woman to discover that she could not be made unhappy, and also to discover why. It was because her nature was so large and strong and fine. Sometimes she thinks Dr. Ware would be better and happier in a parish, "But I have no care about the future other than that which one must have,--a desire to fulfil the duties which it may bring." Surely that is being,

"Self-poised and independent still On this world's varying good or ill."

In 1842, Dr. Ware's health became so much impaired that Mrs. Ware entertains an unfulfilled desire. It is to get away from Cambridge, which had become so dear to them all. "I scruple not to say that a ten-foot house, and bread and water diet, with a sense of rest to _him_, would be a luxury." The family removed to Framingham, where Dr.

Ware died, a year later. Whatever tribulations might be in store for Mrs. Ware, anxiety on his account was not to be one of them.

Death came on Friday; on Sunday, Mrs. Ware attended church with all her family, and the occasion must have been more trying for the minister who preached to her than for herself. A short service was held that Sunday evening at six, and "Then," she says, "John and I brought dear father's body to Cambridge in our own carriage; we could not feel willing to let strangers do anything in connection with him which we could do ourselves." Think of that dark, silent lonely ride from Framingham to Cambridge! But here was a woman who did not spare herself, and did not ask what somebody would think of her doings.

After this event, the Memoirs tell us that a gentleman in Milton gave her a very earnest invitation to go there and take the instruction of three little children in connection with her own. In this occupation she spent six years of great outward comfort and usefulness. There is much in these years, or in the letters of these years, of great interest and moral beauty. Even with young children to leave, she speaks of death as serenely as she would of going to Boston. "I do not feel that I am essential to my children. I do not feel that I am competent to train them."

Of her last illness, one of her children wrote, "Never did a sick room have less of the odor of sickness than that. It was the brightest spot on earth." "Come with a _smile_," she said to a friend whom she had summoned for a last farewell, and so went this remarkable and exceptionally n.o.ble woman.

III

LYDIA MARIA CHILD

[Ill.u.s.tration: LYDIA MARIA CHILD]

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, few names in American literature were more conspicuous than that of Lydia Maria Child, and among those few, if we except that of Miss Sedgwick, there was certainly no woman's name. Speaking with that studied reserve which became its dignity, the _North American Review_ said of her: "We are not sure that any woman of our country could outrank Mrs. Child. This lady has been before the public as an author with much success. And she well deserves it, for in all her works, nothing can be found which does not commend itself by its tone of healthy morality and good sense. Few female writers if any have done more or better things for our literature in the lighter or graver departments."