● ● ● least midway between heaven and earth, till the driver’s shrill whistle, or a more tolerable road would restore my senses; Mr Hale is the very most polite good natured driver in the whole world (as I have seen it all) and was very kind to me on your account I suppose.”
The Swaseys wanted her to stay at Haverhill “until commencement,” but she found so much to excite her and such a “teazing etiquette” in the village that “it is not best for my health,” and she left after a couple of days.123 Before leaving she took a walk to an Indian encampment “with Mrs. Redding sister to the political demagogue (I. Hill) and a Mrs. Horatio Hill; the latter is from N[ew] York and a consummate fool.” Mrs. R., on the other hand, “is a sanguine politician, purely radical, and I should think possessing a stored and discriminating mind.” The Indians were “healthy and happy, a very good hint from nature.” And as a final touch: “Had a fine game at ‘Nine pins.’ ”124
But the journey home brought a night of unexplained anguish in the stagecoach and a determination never again to travel alone at night. Arrived at the inn at Lebanon on the way back to Sanbornton, she threw herself on the bed in utter exhaustion. There seemed to be a heavy price to pay for every pleasure; the jolly Pickwickian stagecoach ride of two days before could be transformed into the nightmare horror of De Quincey’s fleeing mail coach.125
Trivial in themselves, these incidents suggest something much deeper. On the other side of the world about this time, Søren Kierkegaard was exploring in Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Dread the immeasurable solitude and subjectivity of human existence.126
123 Mary Baker to George Sullivan Baker, 21 July 1843 (archivist estimate), 1919.001.0010, LMC. This undated letter has hitherto been attributed to the year 1839 when Mary visited her brother Samuel in Boston, and it has been assumed to refer to Haverhill, Massachusetts, rather than Haverhill, New Hampshire. But a careful consideration of the internal evidence makes the present placement inevitable.
124 Mary Baker, “Journal of a trip to the White Hills in July, 1843,” copybook, A09002, pp. 97– 98, MBEL.
125 See particularly the sections of Thomas De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach, entitled “The Vision of Sudden Death” and “Dream-Fugue” [Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, December 1849, pp. 741–755].
126 [Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Liveright, 2014). Modern translations render “dread” as “anxiety” in the title of The Concept of Dread.]