● ● ● the loss of its number. But as Burns says, “hope springs exulting on triumphant wings.”22
These early letters of Mary Baker contain all the contradictions, the changes of mood, the trivialities as well as the aspirations that one would expect from a normal young girl of talent and sensibility in the 1830s. To be sure, the human comedy was sometimes darkened by pain and weariness and loss, but hope sprang exulting on triumphant wings. And up or down, Mary Baker was always engaged with life.
In 1876, after the publication of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy received a letter from her cousin D. Russell Ambrose. He recalled to her their friendship forty years earlier when she was “a frail, fair young maiden with transparent skin & brilliant blue eyes, cheerful, hopeful, enthusiastic.”23
This is the picture of Mary Baker that emerges again and again from the evidence, as distinct from the legend. She is described as “the village beauty,” and “the ‘belle’ of the community, always laughing.”24 Her enormous, deep-set eyes, “overhung by dark lashes,” her clear, fresh complexion and chestnut-colored hair, her shapely figure, “slim, alert, and graceful,” the chic she somehow managed to achieve in her dress even in that rustic community—these were the envy and admiration of Sanbornton Bridge.25
24 [Milmine, “Mary Baker G. Eddy,” McClure’s, p. 233]; Thomas M. Towns and Joseph C. Wyatt, recorded in Ray H. Perkins, c. February 1932, Subject File, Ray H. Perkins, p. 8, MBEL. These two acquaintances of Mary Baker in her youth and young womanhood stated that her popularity aroused the resentment of one Hannah Sanborn who, as an old lady, was the source of many of the more sensational charges against Mrs. Eddy which were accepted as gospel by Milmine and the biographers who followed her. Wyatt reported that he had seen Miss Sanborn as a girl “turn away in disgust” as the young man she wanted walked home with Mary Baker instead of her. Perkins, reporting Towns and Wyatt, inadvertently refers to her as “Miss Dearborn,” the confusion probably arising from the fact that her father’s name was Dearborn Sanborn [Perkins, p. 4]. See M. T. Runnels, History of Sanbornton, New Hampshire, vol. 2, Genealogies (Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1881), p. 667.
↑25 The phrases quoted are from Milmine, “Mary Baker G. Eddy,” McClure’s, p. 235; these and the other details in the description are agreed on by critics and friends alike.
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