A young girl full of lively hopes but alone and terrified in a stagecoach clattering through the unknown night might serve as the very symbol of the individual predicament as Kierkegaard saw it. A few years later in The Sickness unto Death he wrote:
Even that which, humanly speaking, is the most beautiful and lovable thing of all, a feminine youthfulness which is sheer peace and harmony and joy—even that is despair. For . . . in the hidden recesses of happiness, there dwells also the anxious dread which is despair; it would be only too glad to be allowed to remain therein, for the dearest and most attractive dwelling-place of despair is in the very heart of immediate happiness. All immediacy, in spite of its illusory peace and tranquility, is dread, and hence, quite consistently, it is dread of nothing.127
Mary Baker herself would more than once in later years use the gothic image of the death’s-head at the feast. Her silvery laughter could never quite drown out the rattle of mirthless bones in the plunging coach at midnight. She had, in a sense, known all her life that mortal existence stood poised on nothingness. While it was fashionable for young ladies to read and write melancholy poems about death, the lines she copied into her notebook at this time seem to have something of the genuine shiver of mortality within their conventional words—perhaps simply because of the eager love of life out of which they were written. Arrived back in Sanbornton from her mountain trip, she copied a poem of Barry Cornwall’s which ended:
We toil through pain and wrong,
We fight and fly;
We love, and then ere long
Stone dead we lie.
Oh! life, is all thy song Endure, and die!128
127 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), pp. 37–38.
128 [Barry Cornwall, “Life,” copied on 25 August 1843, Mary Baker, copybook, A09002, p. 40, MBEL.]