● ● ● proposing marriage, he parted from her and went to the South, where in time he became a well-known educator and scholar.117 In 1906 when Mrs. Eddy was under public attack, he issued a statement worded with old-school gentility:
I have known the Rev. Mary Baker Eddy from childhood. . . . She was always a beloved visitor in our home. We corresponded for several years while I was in college; the correspondence ended with my regret. I have always admired my cousin’s sincerity and devotion to good works. Her brother Albert was one of the ablest lawyers of New Hampshire; but Mary was deemed the most scholarly member of her family. She has always held a sacred place in my heart. It gives me great pleasure to find that God is always protecting her.118
In 1841 Mary’s former teacher, Sarah Jane Bodwell, had married one Charles Lane, who published a local weekly called the Belknap Gazette. Miss Bodwell had encouraged Mary’s poetic efforts, and now her husband began to publish some of them in his paper. Before long, poems signed by Mary M. Baker began to appear also in the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette. In a modest way her career as an author had been launched.119
Early in 1843 she wrote Augusta, now Mrs. Swasey, a letter in which the normal trifles, jokes, and pieties of the village scene all tumbled out in a heap:
Two weeks after you left, I had taken my pen for a long “tete a tete” with dear Augusta; and had not sooner commenced, than all of a sudden a ride was proposed to Concord. . . . Found Martha like yourself ● ● ●
117 See “Dr. H. H. Smith,” in Atlanta Journal, September 14, 1908: “His was a scholarship such as the south has rarely ever seen, combined with a gentleness and courtesy, the fine flavor of a high gentility and a native vigor of intellect which could not fail to place him among the notable figures of the south,” etc.
118 Smith, Historical Sketches, p. 31.
119 A poem entitled “The Mourner” by M.M.B. in Godey’s Lady’s Book in June 1843, p. 276, has been conjecturally assigned to Mary Baker by Bates-Dittemore, but a reprinted version of it in a later anthology shows it to have been by another writer with the same initials. [Bates and Dittemore, Truth and Tradition, pp. 26–27.] However, Mary did later contribute to Godey’s. See p. 150.