Actually Sarah soon tired of her bargain and stopped reading. When Mrs. Glover learned this, she charitably commended the child for reading as much as she had, then gave her the present anyway. It was a heart with a cardboard cover which opened “and you pulled out texts from the Bible and little verses on leaflets.” Sarah’s comment years later was: “I liked the verses better than the texts and the painted flowers which encircled them best of all, but, taking it all in all, the present was something of a disappointment.”¹¹²

Whatever Mrs. Glover’s own disappointment may have been over the formal shortcomings of Sarah’s religious education, she unfailingly responded to that quality in childhood which a post-Freudian age may be permitted to call its frank and fresh innocence.¹¹³ Like the child, she felt that boundless good should be possible. Always there was something like astonishment at the successive blows struck by fate. She wrote the words “Oh how true” opposite these lines from Mrs. Hemans: 

                                                . . . Manhood rears
A haughty brow, and Age has done with tears,
But youth bows down to misery, in amaze
At the dark cloud o’ermantling its fresh days;
And thus it was with her.¹¹⁴

In a letter to a friend in 1850 she enclosed a poem which started off: 

Why does pain come, 
Marring each pleasure; 
Why does want come, 
Spoiling each treasure;
     Making us doubtful, and gloomy, and sad?