● ● ●  well as an untamed continent would have done. Even in a quiet corner of New Hampshire, battles fought with obscure and malevolent forces might be linked to cosmic issues.

Sibyl Wilbur writes of talking with an old lady at North Groton who, on one occasion in younger days, heard the tinkling of the little bell which Mrs. Patterson kept at her bedside. Going to her aid, the woman found that she had fallen unconscious, with foam on her lips, and only slowly was she brought back to consciousness.⁵² Her lonely battles were sometimes fought in total solitude, and although she was thrown to the lap of mother earth, as Margaret Fuller recommended, she did not rise with added strength.

Nor if she looked up to where the stars wheeled calmly through the night sky did she find an answer there. This might be the army of unalterable law, as Meredith said, but a young German scientist called Rudolf Clausius had just defined a law which in time would lead to the conclusion that the universe must end as a cold, dark, blind, inert chaos. Mrs. Patterson could not have known of this second law of thermodynamics, but she knew in her bones that destruction and chaos were written into the universe of matter as surely as she felt in her heart that life and order were the mandate of God.