● ● ● And thus our dear Savior by conflict forms
The meek and enduring heart
These, these are the teachings of wisdom and love
So lean on thy Fathers breast
Tis the fold for the lambkin the cote of the dove
Where the love of thy heart can rest.95
Beneath the known “facts” of even the most carefully recorded life invisible currents run, to be guessed at only from hints and indirections and from the sudden surprises of later years, for even a commonplace and almost predictable life never loses entirely the capacity to surprise us. This must be vastly more so in the case of one in whom an unseen spiritual purpose is slowly and perhaps unconsciously forming. Where the known outward facts are few we doubly value the sudden revealing glimpse of hidden movement that an upturned fragment of evidence may offer. Such a fragment is a passage in the “Ode to adversity” which Mrs. Patterson entered in her notebook at this time:
Am I to conflicts new to be innured?
No! I have long the utmost wrongs indured
And drawn fresh energies from sharpest blows
Thus from rude hammer strokes or burning heat
With each successive change refined complete
The gold is purged of dross and brightly glows.96
The trumpets of war were sounding, and the martial mood blended with the vigor of Mrs. Patterson’s renewed determination to break through to life.
The thunderous events of recent years had shaken her loose from the old Jacksonian ties and had put her squarely behind the new party of Frémont and Lincoln. The poignantly dramatic return of the fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, from Boston to slavery; the brutal caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate; the Dred Scott decision; the Old ● ● ●