On one occasion, when she had one of her spells, she regained consciousness to find Albert sitting beside her with a copy of Young’s Night Thoughts. Then he read for her comfort a passage which she afterwards copied into her notebook and marked with a notation of the incident:

Why start at death? where is he? Death arriv’d,
Is past; not come, or gone; he’s never here.
Ere hope, sensation fails; black-boding man
Receives, nor suffers, Death’s tremendous blow.
The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave;
 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

These are the bugbears of a winter’s eve,
The terrors of the living, not the dead.
Imagination’s fool, and error’s wretch,
Man makes a death which Nature never made;
Then on the point of his own fancy falls,
And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.⁵²

It would, however, take more than Edward Young and his Night Thoughts to banish the king of terrors. It would take long years of battling to the conviction that Life is all.

The theme which engaged the Puritan imagination more than any other was that of Paradise Lost, of “man’s first disobedience” and its fruits.⁵³ It is not surprising to find among the many passages of poetry which Mary Baker copied into her girlhood notebooks not only selections from Byron, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and Mrs. Hemans, but also an unusual number of lengthy quotations from that great religious epic which undertook to justify the ways of Milton’s God to Adam’s seed.

If we may judge by these excerpts, it was the human dilemma, the domestic tragedy, in Paradise Lost that interested her more than the cosmic drama. As she copied down the final lines of the poem describing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise—