There seems to be more than rhetoric in the words she wrote in the margin: “(O God) is it all?”

Yet at this very time she had just become engaged to be married. George Washington Glover, who had taken her on his knee at Samuel Baker’s wedding twelve years before and said that he would come back to marry her, had come back. A successful builder now in Charleston, South Carolina, he had returned to New Hampshire on occasional visits and on one or two of these occasions had seen the little girl who had so taken his fancy transformed into an attractive young woman, frail in health but with an undeniable radiance that marked her off from the languishing maidens who were very much the fashion just then.

It is not really surprising that a heightened dread of mortality should have accompanied her heightened anticipation. The future opened as boundless possibility—and as unpredictable mystery. It would probably be a mistake to suppose that the foreboding poems she wrote and copied at this time represented her constant or even usual mood. Much of her time was undoubtedly given to excited preparations for departure, to all the normal delights and passing worries of a bride-to-be. And in at least one hour she and her mother shared an inspiration so unforgettable that it became something sacred to them.¹²⁹

Yet the premonition of mortality remained. Her family noted and shared the troubled doubts that accompanied her hopes. At Thanksgiving George Baker handed her a poem expressing his concern:

Say Sister, 
     Why that tear o’er youth’s fair cheek
To scald its hope flushed glow
Why shrinks that heart in sadness deep
Which joys of youth should only know
Thy bark though frail the bark of life
May safely mount the swelling tide
Whilst sterling worth and pious aim
Anchor and helm—with thee abide.¹³⁰