In the poem which she inevitably wrote to commemorate the occasion, she addressed the friends who “throng in crowds around me” and with a sense of real regret at the parting announced, “I am now alone in soul.” The poem ended by turning back in thought to “childhood’s home” and asking whether “a Mother’s fondest welcome” could fail to dry her tears.⁹

Before she could receive the ambivalent comfort of her mother’s welcome she and her Masonic escort had to make a long, slow journey in midsummer heat and painful discomfort; first, by rail to Weldon, North Carolina; thence “through the dismal swamp” to Portsmouth, Virginia; from there by steamboat to Baltimore and then by another steamboat to Frenchtown, where they changed to railroad again and crossed Delaware to New Castle; there another steamboat took them to Philadelphia and still another to Bristol, Pennsylvania; from there the railroad carried them to Jersey City and the ferry to New York.

After one night’s rest in the American Hotel in that city—from whose overpowering heat Edgar Allan Poe had just rescued his child-wife by finding her a cottage outside the city—the travelers proceeded by boat to Stonington, Connecticut, thence by rail to Boston, where they changed cars once again for Concord, finally arriving by stage or carriage at Sanbornton Bridge, having traveled about fourteen hundred miles in four days and nights, according to Mrs. Glover’s calculations in her notebook.¹⁰ It was a grim enough journey for anyone; it may well have been a nightmare to the exhausted young widow in her advanced state of pregnancy.

At the end of the journey was “home.” In one way it was comfort and safety, a return to the well-loved nest, to the brooding wings of the mother bird. In another sense it was failure and defeat, a return to dependency, to the tyranny of the customary and the outgrown. The independence she had begun to savor as a socially successful young matron must now be surrendered. The adventure was over.