Christ hath all our tears
Within His own kind keeping
Those He loveth best
He chastens till they love Him
And to his dear breast
He folds the weary lambkin 
        Weep lady weep.³⁶

The poem begins lightly enough, but like Mary’s life it moves to an unexpected conclusion. She had entitled her long, earlier, introspective poem “Shade and Sunshine,” and to leave out either the sunshine or the shadow would be to falsify the picture. In a letter some years later one of her several suitors wrote her, “I hope and trust you are as lively and gay as you were a part of the time while at Hill . . . do you feel as well?”³⁷ A part of the time was overshadowed by pain.

It is necessary here to distinguish between the genuine suffering that darkened her life in those years and the romantic melancholy she shared as a literary fashion with the age.³⁸ George Baker, away from family and friends, could feel this no less than Mary, and it is hardly surprising to find him quoting Byron in his notebook and writing: “My book is neglected, not to say forsaken, and my pen laid aside! What are my prospects? Whilst on one hand, a delicate constitution and impair’d health enfeebles, on the other, poverty lays her iron grasp. Behind, in mem’ry’s dim perspective, are but joys past and past-times fled.”³⁹

But health was for Mary a more serious business than an occasion for romantic melancholy. The Baker letters are full of references to poor health on the part of one member of the family or another, but Mary appears to have been the chief sufferer. In 1837 both she and Martha had long sieges of sickness; in April Martha could write of herself as having been “comfortably ill” through the winter and confined to her room “pretty snugly,” while three months later she wrote of Mary: “In addition to her former diseases her stomach became most shockingly  ● ● ●