● ● ● opposite a passage on romantic love which started out, “Oh love, love, strong as death!”72
Mrs. Glover’s own verses returned again and again to the theme of death as the other pole of romantic love; and although many of these poems fall within the category of the sentimental graveyard verse so popular then, her concern with the theme suggests more than morbid aesthetic fancy. The precariousness of the human condition was driven home to her by the insecurity of her own existence, and there were times when she could almost say with Keats, “I have been half in love with easeful death.”73
It was death which in 1849 once again ripped apart the dailiness of Sanbornton life. For some time the burden of existence had been growing heavier in Abigail Baker’s heart. A year earlier she had written her son George: “I may have my health again but Dear George I feel as thoug[h] my glass was almost run. . . . I must say that every line from you is a Luxury except when you begin about Fate that’s a great word and it distress[es] me for I know too well how to sympathise with you.”74
In August, 1849, she wrote him: “I reflect and remember the days when our Family Circle were Compos’d of six Children with tallents (pardon me) and voices sufficient to raise a Mothers heart to Heaven . . . but O how have we all perverted our tallents.”75 The common guilt of Adam’s race lay heavily on her natural goodness.
Two or three months later, after selling his farm, Mark Baker prepared to move with his wife, his daughter, and his grandson to a house in Sanbornton Bridge, a change which may have been designed to make things easier for Abigail but which came too late.76 On November 4, George Baker and Martha Rand were married in the old farmhouse, leaving at once for Baltimore where George had a new position. On ● ● ●
72 [“The Forest Sanctuary,” in The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans; Complete in One Volume (Philadelphia: Grigg, Elliot, 1847), p. 7, B00203, MBEL.]
73 [“Ode to a Nightingale,” in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 281.]
74 Abigail Ambrose Baker to George Sullivan Baker, 2 September 1848, 1919.001.0016, LMC.
75 [Abigail Ambrose Baker to George Sullivan Baker, 7 August 1849, 1919.001.0017, LMC.]
76 Mark Baker had been making some successful investments in railroad stocks and was in a state of comparative prosperity.