O skillful torture! vicegerent of woe
More to be feared than lover’s perjured vow
Life’s little joy shreded and torn by thee
Floats a mere wreck upon her moonless sea
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Why are poor mortals subject to thy will
Thou last infirmity of human ill!
O’er wearied nature at the midnight hour
Remorseless tyrant! to assert thy power49
The midnight hours were the hours when nature, that great Calvinist, stripped away the puny securities of mortal life and revealed the abyss of nothingness on which the proud dust rears its throne. Mark Baker’s religion must take a great share of the responsibility for his daughter’s affliction; yet it served also to bring the young girl face to face with ultimate concerns.
When, for instance, she read Young’s Night Thoughts, it was for her no mere compendium of gloomy splendors and funereal rhetoric; it was a confrontation of the riddle of life and death. That huge philosophical poem, so unreadable to most people today, she read, reread, pondered, and absorbed;50 it entered her heart, her mind, her imagination; it stayed with her through her life; it echoes and re-echoes through her writings:
Is Heaven tremendous in its frowns? Most sure;
And in its favours formidable too;
Its favours here are trials, not rewards;
A call to duty, not discharge from care.51
49 Mary Baker Glover, entry c. 1844, “Nervousness,” poem, A09002, p. 116, MBEL. “Charleston” written above poem.
50 George Saintsbury once described it as “an enormous soliloquy . . . addressed by an actor of superhuman lung-power to an audience of still more superhuman endurance.” [George Saintsbury, “Young, Collins and Lesser Poets of the Age of Johnson,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, vol. 10, The Age of Johnson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), p. 160.]
51 [Edward Young, The Complaint: Or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (London: A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1756), p. 14.]