● ● ●  she live any time, and this is altogether uncertain. It surely is with all of us but it seems to be more so with her, since she retains life only by dieting and brushing, and all such simple expedients.”⁴⁴

Albert could never write without urging Mary to take care of her health. “Dont breath[e] these awful frosts,” he warned, and again: “Be careful that you do not sacrifice too often at the shrine of the muses. Your health is of paramount importance, yet, though you may think yourself partly well.”⁴⁵ Perhaps the most significant reference to Mary’s health occurs in a letter written to her by Albert in 1840: “I received a letter from Mrs Tilton yesterday, with sad intelligence in relation to your health. I hope she may have exagerated, & that your sufferings are not so severe, as my fears represent them. I wish I were with you. . . . I hope your usual fortitude may not have deserted you.”⁴⁶

Mary evidently could bear the ordinary sorts of pain stoically enough. But there were times when something more was involved—when, in her weakened condition the burden of the mortal state became too crushing to be borne. This was when life took on the look of nightmare, overburdened nerves gave way, and she would end in a state of unconsciousness that would sometimes last for hours and send the family into a panic. On such an occasion Lyman Durgin, the Bakers’ teen-age chore boy, who adored Mary, would be packed off on a horse for the village doctor;⁴⁷ in later years he recalled that on cold winter nights he rode bareback so that the horse might help to keep him warm.⁴⁸

Apparently these attacks were comparatively rare in Mary’s youth, since the frequent references to her illnesses in the Baker letters specify colds, fever, backache, lung and liver troubles, and above all dyspepsia as the cause of her family’s concern. Yet the occasional torture of nerves could be worse than steady physical pain, and this is suggested by a poem called “Nervousness” which she wrote a few years later: