● ● ● We will go to Mrs. Glover
And tell her we love her—
an adaptation of a popular song of the period. However, two of them, half a century or more later, added rather more illuminating recollections or comments.
Sarah Clement Kimball, who as a little girl all but idolized Mrs. Glover, recalled the one occasion on which she was afraid of her:
I was an “enfant terrible” at times and one day [Mrs. Glover] said she would have to whip me, to go out and choose a stick. I went out in fear and trembling and brought in a little twig, the smallest I could find. When I took it to her, she looked at it and then at me and she smiled—and I don’t have to go ’way back to remember her smile, because no one who has ever seen it would be likely to forget it—she had the most beautiful smile. She told me to go and take my seat and that ended the incident.29
Thomas F. Page wrote in more philosophical vein, “Looking backward now to those days I can see in her that which I then could not because of my age and inexperience.” There seems to be in some people, he went on, a genius “wholly unknown to any but they of the Spirit.” Such individuals “find hard contact with the masses, and, wherein they excel, such excellence is counted at a discount, they are reckoned as not quite up to the human standard by those who are not strong in spirit.”30
As this reminiscence suggests, Mrs. Glover’s experiment was not accounted a success in Sanbornton Bridge. This is not altogether surprising when one remembers the way in which the earlier innovations of an inspired teacher like Bronson Alcott caused him to be ridiculed and driven out of a similar country community. However, for several years afterwards the seminary conducted a primary department, a fact which a present-day educator in Tilton (as Sanbornton Bridge was renamed in 1869) takes as evidence of the essential effectiveness ● ● ●
29 Sarah Clement Kimball, recorded in Ruth W. Wardwell to The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1 February 1920, Reminiscence, pp. 3–4, MBEL [bracketed text Peel’s].
30 Thomas F. Page to Mr. Keyes, 25 April 1898, Reminiscence, p. 2, MBEL.