● ● ● grief. In her scrapbook, opposite several items which spoke of immeasurable woe, she simply wrote “1856.”10
A year after George’s departure she entered in her scrapbook a poem “Consolations” by Park Benjamin and wrote opposite it: “Mine, April 5th 1857.” It read in part:
My childhood knew misfortune of a strange and weary kind,
And I have always worn a chain, though not upon my mind,
And I render thanks to thee, oh God! from my prison,
that I live
Unshorn of that best privilege which thou alone canst give!
I mean a soul to apprehend the beauty that is spread
Above me and around me and beneath my feeble tread
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And though bereft of freedom in the body, I can fly
As high as Heaven on wings of thought, like an eagle
to the sky.11
A month later another entry showed deeper discouragement:
I slept very little last night in consequence of memory and wounded feelings. My spine is so weak and inflammatory that the least mental emotion gives me suffering that language cannot depict. Then the debility which follows seems nearly as distressing. Oh! how long must I bear this burden life?12
After still another month Martha Pilsbury wrote to George Baker’s wife, Martha Rand Baker, who was now living again in New Hampshire:
11 Park Benjamin, “Consolations,” in Mary Baker Patterson, scrapbook, 5 April 1857, SB001, p. 48, MBEL. This scrapbook, to which she paid particular attention during the bleak middle years, should not be confused with the two notebooks in which she copied her own and others’ poems, chiefly during her earlier years.
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